And There I Stood with My Piccolo

36

36. MAXWELL HOUSE HAS BEEN ON Thursday for years and years since way back before Captain Henry's Show Boat. Funny how Thursdays have always had a special kind of flavor for me, starting with my Saturday Evening Post route in Mason City. When I was a kid, the Post came out on Thursdays—nowadays it comes out on Tuesdays. Maybe in the next generation it will be pushed back to Saturday again—wouldn't that be interesting? Anyhow, I bought this Post route for fifteen dollars from Merlin Bushgens, and it included sixty customers —mostly doctors, dentists, and lawyers—with a few Country Gentleman and Ladies' Home Journals thrown in, also some good will on account of Merlin had a pleasant freckle-faced personality. Thursday, consequently, tasted different from any other day, on account of I delivered the Posts before school and collected after school and sold a few on Main Street (now Federal Avenue) before 235 supper. I used to ham up my sales talk plenty in front of the Idle Hour Theatre where Elsie Johanson sold tickets after school. She was my first real crush and I left most of the profits from my Post route at her ticket window, in the form of all-day suckers, little pink hearts with mottoes on them, or molasses-and-peanut-butter kisses from the tencent store. I got up the nerve to ask her to a dance in the Knights of Pythias Hall one time—and I felt pretty good about my first attempt at the one-step, which consisted, as I think back, of a clumsy sort of march straight down the border of the dance floor to the corner and then a convulsive swing around to the left and continuing like that all the way around, with a triumphant look-Ma-Fm-dancing expression on my kisser. I seemed to have something on the ball, though, because it was the first dance of the evening and the wax was fresh and everybody was slipping and sliding around but me. My success, however, as I soon discovered to my gulping horror, was only due to the mud-stained overshoes which I had forgotten to take off. Thursdays, on the way home from selling Posts, I used to pass the Congregational Church, and there was a pretty good chance I'd meet Mr, Patchen, my piano teacher, who always ran over the organ music late Thursday afternoon for choir 236 practice that night. So I invariably managed to be whistling "The Anvil Chorus" or the "Quartette " from Rigoletto when I passed within earshot of the church, to kind of impress Mr. Patchen with my good musical taste. The "different" flavor of Thursday followed me into the New York Philharmonic's Thursday concerts in Carnegie Hall, and then Maxwell House, and even in the Army we did Command Performance every Thursday, so what with one thing or another, I've eaten my Thanksgiving turkey most of my life on the run, between concerts or rehearsals or delivering Posts or something. Well, anyway, it's Thursday and it's 10:30 A.M., time for the Maxwell House dress rehearsal. We usually read the show through only twice, being as how we've already rehearsed on Wednesday. The writers and producers make slightsuggestions about different inflections or the sound effects, and the engineer who controls the mikes marks his script according to what mike should be open at what time. The orchestra arrives at one-thirty and we then rehearse the musical number, the musical commercial , and each bridge—usually twelve or fifteen seconds of music indicating the mood or scene changes or passing of time. By now it's probably four-thirty and the whole cast is reassembled for a once-over-lightly reading. At this session there 237 is a curious combination of it's-all-set-now relaxation and this-is-it tension, and everybody wants everybody else to do good, and show business and esprit and camaraderie begin to take over. George says, "Can we move?" Never "Let's start," or "Shall we begin"—always "Can we move?" And at five we're through reading and from five tofivefifteen we get nervous and at five-fifteen Bill Goodwin walks out onto the stage and starts the "warmup ." This warm-up is a pre-show routine that is part of every radio program, and the idea...