And There I Stood with My Piccolo

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POINTS OF VIEW CHANGE, DON T they? I already mentioned that I used to think "doily" wasa naughtyword. Used to mix it up with "diaper," I guess, which, of course, nobody would ever say in front of anybody. Well, only last week I saw a laundry service ad in the Los Annelus Times—"Rock-A-Dry-Baby"—and I must say I was taken even farther apace by the ad for a new kind of men's shorts with a print design of big red ants, and these new shorts have a name. They are called ANTSY-PANTS. Everybody has earth-shaking ideas like that sooner or later. Grow mushrooms in the cellar! Plant black walnut saplings in the back yard and raise a grove of airplane struts and gun butts! I had two earth shakers. The first was to paint successive-action pictures one after the other in the tunnel of the New York subway—pictures like those black-and-white drawings in the little books you used to flip past your eye. The successive192 29. action drawings made it look like moving pictures , remember? Well, the principle would be the same in the tunnel of the subway, only instead of flipping the pictures past your eye with your thumb, the subway train would flip you (and your eye) past the pictures. The other one was to make a breakfast food, sort of like loose shredded wheat chopped up, and call it "Short Shrift." In San Francisco one day a friend of mine dropped in, which surprised me at the time because he lived in New York. He was carrying with him a banged-up, scrawny, suspicious-looking ladies ' traveling hatbox which he cautiously and lovingly laid on the desk. Out of his overcoat pocket he took a can of fruit salad and a can opener. Then out of the hatbox he took a weird-looking contraption, all haywired together, and plugged it into the wall socket. As this device started going hunkacha-hunkachahunkacha , he opened the fruit salad, dumped it into the contraption for about thirty seconds, pulled out the plug, poured what used to be fruit salad into a tumbler he got from his inside pocket, and said, "Drink this." Yes—everybody gets earth-shaking ideas sooner or later, the only difference is that this fellow's earth shaker worked. His name is Fred Waring 193 and the contraption is now called the Waring Mixer. Fred Waring is also distinguished for his willingness to go to hellangone just for a gag. We got into a polite argument the day he unveiled his mixer about the relative carrying power of high and low frequencies. I reminded him that when a parade was approaching from far off, the first thing you heard was the piccolo. He thanked me for reminding him of this but pleasantly insisted that even before you heard the sounds of the piccolo you always heard the thud of the bass drum. The upshot of this intellectual, not to say cultural , discussion was a pre-dawn rendezvous that took us out into San Francisco Bay, where we dodged ferryboats and tugs and barges for an hour as we rowed over to what is now Treasure Island. For the rest of the morning we marched over that wave-splattered, wind-beaten rock, trilling and thumping our respective instruments like two thirds of the Spirit of '76, trying to prove which sound carried the farthest to a pretty disgusted committee who strained their ears from the clock tower on top of the Ferry Building back on the mainland, and of course heard nothing at all but the usual comings and goings of the early-morning bay traffic. I guess Fred was eclipsed, though, in the matter 194 of "anything for a gag" by one Phil Rapp, a talented little man who wrote the Morgan-Brice Maxwell House program and often referred to Mr. Morgan and Miss Brice as "figments of his imagination ." After each show Al Kaye, the producer, always called this fine writer on the phone to ask how the show came over, as Mr. Rapp preferred to listen to it at home rather than at the studio. One week we really had a stinker. Mr. Morgan may have lost count of his juleps before going on the air and taken too many or too few, and Miss Brice's timing may have been off...