Sunday, March 16, 2014

As I Remember Them

Nostalgia is a trap, but it's hard to get away from the idea that in some far-off "Golden Age" there were performers, not just celebrities. This reminiscence by Eddie Cantor contains chapters on well-known vaudeville and movie personalities like W.C. Fields, Will Rogers, and Jimmy Durante, plus capsules of a few performers like Bert Williams and Bea Lillie who won't be known to most readers today. The jokes are corny but produce a laugh, and the anecdotes, while mostly light-hearted, can turn poignant, as when Cantor tells how Rogers was so affected by a complaint from a clergyman about the morality of a play he was in that he dropped out and accepted an invitation from Wiley Post to fly around the world.

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