Now Comes The Hard Part: A home for GHOST LIGHT

 

 

 It’s hard to say how long it’s taken me to put together GHOST LIGHT, what I feel is a cohesive collection of poems inspired by the Ziegfeld Follies of 1919. Does a lifetime of isolating interest count? Where did it begin, you might ask? I was born in 1962, well after Vaudeville’s heyday and on the cusp of Beatlemania. Many performers had retired to the suburbs of Long Island, a fact that causes me no small amount of regret. I had neither the nerve nor the ability in those pre-Internet days to seek these treasures out while they were still with us to tell their stories. Luckily a few others did, and we have those interviews, and at very least their obituaries, to tease our hunger for more.

In 1956, The Wizard of Oz made its television debut, and by the time I started watching and absorbing it a decade later, it had become an annual event as big as Christmas. Growing up, we may have lacked for material things here and there, but we always had a great, big color console TV. Those ruby slippers practically leapt off the screen! I believe that for me, Oz and Funny Girl were indirectly my two greatest inspirations to learn more about entertainers of the early 20^th century. Up until the mid-1970s, prime time programming was heavily influenced by vaudeville, burlesque, and even the presence of many of those entertainment pioneers. From Ed Sullivan to Sonny & Cher, most shamelessly borrowed from well-loved routines, thus perpetuating the art into this century.

It is an epiphany of sorts when one discovers that Glinda was in 1939, the year Oz debuted, the middle-aged widow of Florenz Ziegfeld himself. Both Ray Bolger and Bert Lahr worked briefly for Ziegfeld. Judy Garland would star not so long after as a Ziegfeld Girl in a thoroughly whitewashed melodrama that nonetheless captures some of the magic that happened on the New Amsterdam stage. And so I went down the glittery rabbit hole.

Once I allowed myself the freedom to let the poems be inspired by history, and not slavishly document the exact color of every spotlight, I was able to make significant progress on the work. I hope that the poems breath life back into the people portrayed for a moment, some as popular in their day as Beyonce or Brad Pitt are today. I would love if one or two readers are inspired to explore these histories on their own. I’ve included short bios at the back of the book, hoping to tease and intrigue.

But now here’s that hard part I mentioned. Although I’ve had individual poems published in magazines and anthologies around the world, had several chapbooks produced by small, fine publishers, and even self-published some chapbooks on my own under the dubious “Flying Monkey Press” imprint, I have never submitted a completed, themed manuscript for consideration. It is a unique work for me in that it did require a great deal of research, and the poems although able to stand on their own individually, are intended to be a narrative of highlights. The earliest poem is set in 1896, and the latest in present day, but the bulk tell a story of the Follies of 1919, a year of radical unrest, irrational temperance, and relative calm before the coming decades terrible storms.

I consider it a version of embellished history, with a sound core and some poetical license entwined with the facts. If I didn’t think the poems were good I’d have written it all in prose, and frankly, that’s been done before and by more skillful writers than me. The days of firsthand sources have gotten away from us. Since I am moved nevertheless to write about the times, poetry became my genre of choice. My first step is to reach out to some of the university presses that deal with material close to the subject: Theater, New York City & New York State History, Early 20^th Century Music. I have a proposal letter in the works, and I do think the unique nature of the manuscript could be in my favor. I don’t seem to be able to locate much other poetry about the Follies, although one or two pieces showed up in Google searches.

I am willing to self-publish again if need be, but I would like these poems to reach as wide an audience as possible. It is the collection I have invested the most time, effort, and research into, and I am proud of it, flawed as it is. I suppose Ziegfeld felt the same way, but it will never be the grand performance of epic scope that I first envisioned. Perhaps that’s why it’s taken me so long to complete. The Pandemic, for the most part, did not afford me any extra time to complete this task. Between working from home, fretting about finding new work, and finally working at several new jobs that were not a great “fit,” my hour or so in the morning before the world began to spin was all I could spare. But circumstances have certainly been driving me to take up long unfinished tasks and bring them to some kind of closure. So it has been with GHOST LIGHT, and so it shall be with other endeavors that have been cluttering up Casa Diva for years.

Are They Good Poems, Or Bad Poems? The Follies in Verse

For as long as I can remember, I have been fascinated with the theatre, and vaudeville in particular. It’s been so long, in fact, that I can’t remember when it first started. Warner Brothers’ old Bugs Bunny cartoons often featured popular songs of the ‘30s and ‘40s, and I learned snippets of some over the years, most often with the word “carrot” inserted for good measure. The older cartoons sometimes featured actors I would later recognize from their ink and paint counterparts- Edna May Oliver, Hugh Herbert, and Eddie Cantor, for example. A little jazz-singing owl introduced me early to the plot of Al Jolson’s first talking hit film, The Jazz Singer.

But all the credit can’t go to Bugs. As I delved deeper and deeper into the world of MGM’s The Wizard of Oz, I discovered that all of the leads had come to movies via the stage. Judy Garland of course first appeared as Frances Gumm, of the singing Gumm Sisters. Ray Bolger and Jack Haley were successful hoofers, as was Buddy Ebsen, the ill-fated first man of tin. Bert Lahr had survived the broad burlesque halls, and would return to the stage after an unsatisfying run in Hollywood. Frank Morgan had been an actor for years, following in his brother’s footsteps. Most intriguingly, Billie Burke, all pink fluff and trembles, had been married to the greatest producer Broadway had ever known, Florenz Ziegfeld, and been his widow for only seven years at the time …Oz was made. 

Vaudeville, like most theatrical events, is remembered in shadows. Except for some brief routines, often recorded decades after they’d been introduced, much of what we know is based on scratchy wax records, blurry film, and starry-eyes autobiographies, often ghost-written and almost always obscured by decorum and years. There are books upon books, many written by the performers themselves, others by historians who get most of their material from those same performers’ books. A few ambitious ones go to the newspaper archives, or the theatrical collections, scouring the scrapbooks for some juicy tidbit overlooked, or ignored, by those that came before.

With a very few exceptions (see Mrs. Ziegfeld, by Grant Hayter-Menzies), any books about the Follies written in this century are for the most part compilations of the work of others, or fictional accounts that tend to stray uncomfortably from the truth. Many wander into the territory of exploitation, dramatizing the worst rumors for the sake of storytelling. I wanted to write about the Follies, the year 1919, and all the great characters that made the show offstage as fascinating as what happened at the New Amsterdam. However, I wasn’t comfortable with “filling in the blanks,” on my own, or drawing conclusions on sketchy evidence. I found such so-called ‘histories,’ pretentious, and yet writers were producing such books every day. I haven’t the time to devote to full-time research, so the odds of finding sources that hadn’t yet been used were slim to none. 

Poetry seems to me to be the art of words that will work for this project. The brevity inherent will offer readers an impression of the times, without burdening them with a list of facts or dry, awkward paragraphs of pontification. There are stories that are told again and again-- W. C. Fields whacking Ed Wynn with a pool cue, Billie Burke flinging a diamond bracelet into a corner during one of many battles with Flo, with an eye on where it landed to retrieve it later, Bert Williams taking the freight elevator to his room after wowing audiences night after night onstage…. I feel like these anecdotes, told with grace and art and respect might make a collection of poems that would interest more than just us vaudeville buffs. There’s romance, tragedy, humor, music—actually, many of the same elements found in any edition of the Follies. 1919 was the year Actors Equity came into its own, and the year Prohibition went into effect. The Great War was over, and Woodrow Wilson pushed for a League of Nations to prevent another such global conflict. And still they danced. 

I have twenty-five pages of poems so far, and perhaps a few more brewing. I’ll post one or two here, and would love some feedback on all of it—interest, form, clarity. It’s a labor of love, and my intentions are good, but I might cross some lines. I know there are other buffs out there that will keep me honest.