Theatrical and Circus Life: or, Secrets of the Stage, Green-Room and Sawdust Arena — John Shaqi
Theatrical and Circus Life: or, Secrets of the Stage, Green-Room and Sawdust ArenaJennings, John J. (John Joseph)
History
Theatrical and Circus Life: or, Secrets of the Stage, Green-Room and Sawdust Arena
Jennings, John J. (John Joseph)
Circus; Theater -- United States
The ballet girls of another theatre played an equally effective and
amusing trick upon an obnoxious scene painter. The artist had been in
the habit of painting posts, doorsteps, etc., in the neighborhood of
the stage-door in colors that were not readily perceptible, and when
the young ladies' "mashes" came around after the performance to wait
for them to dress, they innocently sat down upon or leaned against the
fresh paint and ruined their clothes. The scene painter and his friend
were always in the neighborhood to raise a laugh when the disaster
was made known, and the result was that the gay young men would
come near the stage-door no more, and that the sweetly susceptible
creature known as the ballet girl was obliged to go home alone,
supperless. Well, one day the girls found the artist asleep against
his paint-table with a half emptied pitcher of beer by his side.
This was their opportunity. One of the girls who was of a decorative
Oscar-Wilde-like turn of mind got a small brush while another held
the colors, and in ten minutes they had that man's face painted so
that he would pass for a whole stock of scenery; the tattooed Greek
was a mere five-cent chromo alongside of him, and a Sioux Indian with
forty pounds of war-paint on would be a ten-cent side-show beside a
twelve-monster-shows-in-one-under-a-single-canvas exhibition. In this
elaborate but undecorative condition the scene painter wandered off to
a neighboring saloon, the wonder and merriment of all who saw him. He
did not understand the cause of the general stare and unusual laugh at
him, until a too sensitive friend took him to a mirror and showed him
his frescoed features. Profanity and gnashing of teeth followed, and
the artist was prevented from going back to the theatre to murder ten
or twelve people only by a thoughtful policeman who picked him up as
he flew out through the door of the saloon, and carried him off to the
calaboose. He was sorry when he got sober, and from that day to this
has not attempted to paint the coat-tails of the ballet girls' lovers.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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