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SHOWMAN
thing like playing a role strapped on the side of a hiproof. Anyway, you should have seen me in a short red skirt and buckled shoes, with a shawl over my head, talking falsetto and gesturing sidewise at my lost love —and all f or $ 1 o a week.
Or perhaps the lowest I sank was playing with the melodrama company at the worst saloontheater joint in Portland, Oregon. At that period Portland was just two streets on the Columbia River, pretty wide open and tough— nothing so wild as a place like Butte, of course, but even a relatively mild boom-town in the West those times was no place to hold a convention of Sunday School superintendents. I arrived in town as a member of a fairly respectable company touring with Irish plays. But business was so bad that, two days after we hit town, the manager jumped the show, taking the cash-box along after the immemorial custom of managers, and left his company as flat as a tenderfoot after one of the local gambling hells was finished with him. The company disintegrated in a high state of discouragement. My disintegration took place in the direction of the joint aforementioned, which was the only place where work was discoverable.
The scene of my labors will take describing, because I don't suppose a similar institution ever existed anywhere except on the Pacific Coast in its earlier days. The Old Bowery of blessed memory was the Metropolitan Opera in comparison. The theater consisted of an orchestra floor, patronized by people who weren't
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