Word: circuiter
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Last week Conchita was back on the circuit, in Quito. Ecuadorians jammed their old, wooden bull ring. Some even sat on the roof. Although the first bull was sluggish (dulling Conchita's artistry), the judges awarded her both ears. She passed one to the crowd, threw the other away. Aficionados understood: she knew she had not earned a trophy...
...show, Fred was ready. He had rounded up all his jokes and jugglery into an act. "I was a smash," Fred recalls. "They all told me I ought to be on the stage. The bastards. I believed them." At 17, he broke into Sam Cohen's Amateur Night circuit-50? a night. One night a noisy M.C. heckled him: "Where did you learn to juggle?" Allen tried his first onstage ad lib: "I took a correspondence course in baggage-smashing." Soon he got a chance to fill in for a professional juggler-at $2 a night. He took...
...long before Fred started thinking: "What the hell's a juggler? A pair of hands. And you never get anywhere working with your hands." Since people insisted on laughing at him, why not be a comic and get somewhere-maybe even as high as the Keith circuit? Fred changed his billing to "Freddie James -The World's Worst Juggler," and headed for New York. The next year was a time of flea bags, dime dinners and very little work. After that, he traveled-and gained comic breadth. On a tour of Australia he developed a riotous "vent" (ventriloquial...
When the U.S. declared war, Fred came home, joined the Army, entertained in camps. After the war he took the name of an actors' agent, broke into the Keith circuit as Fred Allen, touring with the likes of Sophie Tucker, Eva Tanguay, Rooney & Bent. His act began on a dark stage with a spotlight on a placard, reading: "Mr. Allen Is Quite Deaf. If You Care to Applaud, Please Do So Loudly." His suit, he confided to the audience, had been made in Jersey City-"I'm a bigger man there than I am here...
...December, when wintry winds whistle up the gorge at Harpers Ferry and the temperature nears zero, the bush-league horse-racing circuit shivers to a halt at Charles Town, W. Va. It is the end of the line for gyp (short for gypsy) horsemen and their broken-down nags. Hibernating in the stalls there, the gyps nail up blankets and newspapers to keep out the cold. The swank comforts of Hialeah and Santa Anita are not for them. But this year, for the first time, the gyps went south for the winter. A race track, refurbished lor them, opened...