Word: debutitis
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Last week Stan Kenton, a modernist bandleader whose arrangements blend boppish bounce with blood-curdling dissonances, prepared for his Paris debut with understandable misgivings. But when concert time came, the theater was very nearly filled. When the curtain rose, friendly applause swept up from the audience, and Dixieland partisans, if any, behaved themselves. Kenton & Co. gave them a program of tightly orchestrated originals, emphasizing in turn their lush reeds and knife-edged brasses. After listening to such Kenton favorites as Collaboration, Opus in Pastels, 23 North, 82 West (the coordinates of Havana), the crowd whooped "Bis! Bis!" Said Kenton...
Wagnerian Soprano Helen Traubel, rising to the bait of $7,500, warmed up for a week's work at Chicago's Chez Paree, her debut in any such emporium of liquor and lowbrow music. "There will be no Wagner," she promised. "This will be nothing but fun . . ." Her big number: a take-off on Jimmy Durante and Eddie Jackson mangling that sweet old song Won't You Come Home, Bill Bailey...
Even for those who cared little for ballet, the Rabovskys' debut had human appeal. Last May, booked for guest appearances in East Berlin, they discovered that underneath their hotel was a subway station on the line leading to the Western sector. An hour before their first-night curtain, they slipped downstairs, took a westbound train, and, says Nora, whose English made her the family spokesman, "Whisst, we come out." Last week, curled up on a couch in their London apartment, Nora recalled that for two nights afterward, "I didn't sleep because I was thinking of mother, home...
...Louis department-store show window one day in 1932, Fred Allen, a reformed juggler, made his television debut. The performance was part promotion stunt for his touring show (Three's a Crowd), part demonstration of a new gadget called Sanabria Giant Television,* which transmitted a fuzzy image of Allen to an audience on the store's third floor. "I just stood there and talked," Allen recalls. "It must have come out on the screen like a jumping passport...
...Face in Court. Boston's bluestocking Back Bay Fifth Ward needed a new representative in the legislature. Herter had all the necessary social and political credentials and decided to run. In the effortless fashion of Back Bay politics, he got himself elected, and in 1931 made a gentlemanly debut in the House of Representatives of the General Court of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts (i.e., the lower house of the legislature). He was quickly recognized as a man of clear and analytical mind, who could cope competently with the most complicated legislative processes. In 1939, as a reward...