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WILL ROGERS
ALL ABOUT THE BIG SNAKE DANCE

The Western Weekly, 30 Sep 1928


by WILL ROGERS

Well, all I know is just what I read in the papers, and what I seee here and there. Been jumping around pretty lively lately. Left old Beverly and jumped back to New York to rehearse a part in Dorothy Stone's show. It's the first time I ever did rehearse. In all the Follies, I just generally had my specialty and didn't have to learn any lines only the ones I would read every day in the papers. But this is a kind of a part. Course it's not much of a part as acting goes, but I will have to learn the lines so the other Actors will know whne their cut comes.

It's all greek to me. I feel like a kid at his first school entertainment. Old New York looks just the same after an absence of about three years. Course I have played there every year, but only one night just like all the rest. But this will be my first stage engagement with a show since I left the Follies three years ago.

You know I believe a big city changes less than any other place. It's been many a year since I first went back there, but it don't seem like there has been so many changes. You see it always was so big, that it just don't seem like it can get any bigger. A street can just be so full of houses, and it was full of them when I first saw it. Course they change the houses every few years, but they all look about alike.


His First Night
My first appearnace in New York was at the old Madison Square Garden. It was during a horse show, Col. Zack Mulhall of Mulhall, Oklahoma took a bunch of us boys back there to work as an attraction during the show, and I stayed and went on the stage after the rest come home. It was in 1905. That's twenty-three years ago. I hope Tom Mix don't mind me telling that he was with us too. He has enough that he don't have to worry about how old people might think he is.

Keith's old Union Square on Fourteenth Street was the one where I made my first stage appearance. But it was at the Theatre where they sent me the second week where I made my best hit and stayed at it all summer. That was at the greatest vaudeville theatre of that and all time. That was Hammerstein's. I stayed on the roof one whole summer.

We played on the roof at nights and down stairs at matinee. We have never produced another showman like Willie Hammerstein, and the old man himself was living in those days and with what that theatre made he was able to indulge in presenting opera.


Paging Buck McKee
I used a horse on the stage then and had a Cowboy ride him across at a run and made catches on him as he run by. I had Sheriff Buck McKee with me. I wish I knew where Buck was. He was on a ranch in California some place the last I heard of him. Everybody in vaudeville knew Buck and Te3ddy, the pony. I did that type of act for over three years, during which time I went to Europe twice, played at the Wintergarden, Berlin, in 1907.

But wait, I am getting old and starting to reminence. I will be telling you how much better the performers were in those days than they are today if I keep on. But I must get back to my knitting, and rehearsing. Think of it though! Twenty-three years on the stage and never rehearsed before.

Well let's cut out all this Old Time Hooey, and get down to present day scandal. I am paid to tell the truth about the Politicians and not to drag in old times and tell what we used to do. Let's get back to the comedy. Raskob just come back from the west and says, "Al has the Solid South, the Mushy East, the cracked North, and has a fighting chance in the Cuckoo West." Senator Moses, not the Jewish one but a kind of blackslider and now perhaps a mere babtist, says that Smith won't carry his Brown Derby, that Hoover has the whole thing sowed up, and that the only reason they are going through with the election is just because they have the ballots printed, and its a kind of holiday anyway.


Cautious Democrats
Now that is the way those birds rave on from day to day. You would...






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