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The storm raged and so did the rest of the troupe, but
Stanley Morner kept right on singing — singing
against time and a tent pole . . .
BY DOROTHY DEERE
THE International Concert and Opera Company, purveyors of better times and bigger arias to the Midwestern states, was in a decidedly inharmonious mood. . . .
Professor Alexus Baas, who by coincidence sang bass, was wearing an expression lower than his deepest note. The fact that a slender brunette contralto and a curvesome blonde soprano rode with him on the jouncing floor of the Chewy truck did not keep him from staring savagely at the back of the driver.
“You should be handling a cement-mixer,” he said, addressing the back.
The driver, tenor extraordinary according to the local handbills, had a scowl on his handsome young face — a face that somehow managed to look pure Irish in spite of his Scandinavian, Scotch and Dutch ancestors. At nineteen years, Dennis Morgan, or Stanley Morner as he was named then, was not looking as far ahead as Hollywood. He was listening to the bouncing of five wardrobe trunks roped to the truck’s roof and praying they could make an immediate sixty miles in time for their next tent show. The show, had he but known it, that was to contain all the horrors a tent show could have. . . .
Across Wisconsin, through Michigan, over Illinois, past Indiana into Ohio — for five
months the troupe had been Number Four attraction on the Central Chautauqua Circuit’s list of events. For those five months it had been his job to haul five trunks, the scenery, one male and three females. Dennis shuddered to think of what might have been his lot if he had a full-sized show-tent to haul from state to state. That, and five trunks and the scenery — and three females — !
Females, at this time in his life, were pretty generally divided into three classes. To begin with, there were the women he had left behind him. Mom, who had done some professional singing of her own, and sister Dotty who was at the excitable age, and girl-friend Lillian who actually belonged in a class by herself because someday he was going to marry her. He remembered their pride and emotion, packing his costumes and other theatrical equipment. Dotty, especially, squealing over his stage make-up — a large, round tin plainly labelled “Hero-flesh.” All three of them were back home in Park Falls, Wisconsin, now, imagining him hero-ing it right across the country. . . .
In a way, they were not too wrong — because class Number Two consisted of audience-females, with whom, he modestly admitted, he got along very well. ( Continued on page 79)
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