And There I Stood with My Piccolo

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AT THE RIALTO WE WORE GREEN VELVET coats and starched white vests (laundry problems again!), and if we were one minute late we missed the whole overture because the orchestra pit was an elevator, and when it went up, it went up, and you couldn't sneak in till the lights went down for the newsreel. In my dreams, when I'm not skipping down the steps of the old Mason City High School, I'm usually standing with my heart in my mouth on the Fiftieth Street subway platform, peering up the tracks in the darkness, praying, praying, PRAYING for a Broadway local so I wouldn't miss that theater pit elevator. They called me Down-beat Willson in those days, also Wasp-waist Willson. I was pretty thin. Hugo Riesenfeld was the conductor at the Rialto. There was never anything like him in Mason City. He was a real important figure on Broadway and had a fur collar, a gold-headed cane, 55 8 a Homburg hat, and a Viennese accent. He had the most dramatic way of cuing the cymbal player, like he was reaching out fencing, or trying to spear a doughnut out of thin air, with his left hand stretched out in the opposite direction, pointing down to the floor like for balance. Everybody called him Doctor and he went to Europe every summer. Meanwhile I had become a composer. I'd been writing all kinds of musical junk ever since I was old enough to hold a pencil, but now I'd finally gotten one thing published. A man isn't really a composer till this happens, and although I've never made a hole in one, I think it is entirely safe to say that there is no feeling like the one a person gets the first time he sees his own composition in print, real print. He is now a composer, his music is available to everybody, he has actually created something. This happy event occurred because Dr. Riesenfeld had a secretaryabout my age whose name was Abe Meyer and still is. This Abe Meyer became my best friend and he pestered Dr. Riesenfeld and pestered him till he listened to one of my compositions called "Parade Fantastique." Between Abe and the Doctor they got it published for me, though it was quite a struggle, because I was pretty stubborn about making the necessarychanges. There's nothing more characteristic of human 56 nature than the peculiar illusion that our children can do no wrong. Let the neighbor's dog utter one plaintive little bleat at nine o'clock in the morning and you storm up and down about "that stupid, noisy mutt keeping me up half the night with his howling and yowling." But let your cat claw the sofa till it looks like shredded wheat with legs and you say, "Isn't she smart/" This is why it is a very good plan whenever you write a new song or poem or book or whateveritis to put such a brain child away for a while till you can look at it a little more as though it were somebody else's brat instead of your own angel child. Proud parenthood will fool the most discriminating creator. Ever hear Ellery Queen on the radio or read his books? Now you know there's nothing any more revoltingly corny than the way Sergeant Veelie calls Ellery "Maestro" every other speech—unless it's the way Sam Spade calls every crime a "caper"—yet the author clings to that little device of his as though he had made his great success entirely because of it instead of in spite of it. And the funnies—whoever heard of anybody in this day and age saying "Hark!" But the fella who invented Little Orphan Annie apparently thinks that's real original dialogue. Let other people use old-fashioned talk like "What was that?" or "Listen !" No, Annie is gonna be different and keep right on saying "Hark!" till those little round 57 pupil-less circles of hers are closed for good. In fact, I get so mad at her sometimes I'd like to be the one to do it. And how about the fierce belief that the creator of Bathless Groggins has in that broken-down "Keerect!" that every character in his strip says day after day, year after year. I'm sure...