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Updated: July 27, 2025
Without warning was I wrested from my place, hurled onto the stage, and before my dazzled eyes could accustom themselves to the footlights, I found myself enmeshed in intolerable drama. I was unprepared. I knew my part imperfectly. I missed my cues. I had the blighting self-consciousness of the amateur. And yet the idiot mummery was intensely real.
As Belden sighed, Marshall himself almost gave a groan. He accepted these carefully composed observations for precisely what they seemed. He was too inexperienced in the drama to detect the essential insincerity of every word, though there was not one of the lowliest of his clerks but had heard every one of these phrases bandied across the footlights time and time again.
The height of the roof, the slenderness of the props, the ladders hung with Argand lamps, the atrocious ugliness of scenery beheld at close quarters, the thick paint on the actors' faces, and their outlandish costumes, made of such coarse materials, the stage carpenters in greasy jackets, the firemen, the stage manager strutting about with his hat on his head, the supernumeraries sitting among the hanging back-scenes, the ropes and pulleys, the heterogeneous collection of absurdities, shabby, dirty, hideous, and gaudy, was something so altogether different from the stage seen over the footlights, that Lucien's astonishment knew no bounds.
That which we have both been trying to do at one and the same time: to seize, in passing, these stirring times of ours, these modern manners, that society which perpetuates the antediluvian uproar, that feverish, bustling world always posing before the footlights, that market for the sale of appetites, that kirmess of pleasure that saddens us a little and amuses us a great deal, and allows us romance-writers, simple seekers after truth, to smile in our sleeves at the constant seekers after portfolios.
In reality the manager had no immediate need of the money, but it went against his feelings to allow principles, and above all principles he could not but think absurd, to stand in the way of his turning over a bit of coin. 'Besides, he said, 'how can I put you into a leading business all at once? No matter how well you knew your words, you'd dry up when you got before the footlights.
"She is so fresh, so fresh!" groaned Pulatki from the wings. "She's alive," said Reeser. "She'll never make a show girl, and she's got no voice to speak of. But she's got a personality that climbs right over the footlights. I'm going to engage her for the rest of the season."
"Oh, Thorn! what did you do?" "Went straight after her; found her dancing in Philadelphia, with paint on her cheeks, trinkets on her neck and arms, looking prettier than ever; but the innocent eyes were gone, and I couldn't see my little girl in the bold, handsome woman twirling there before the footlights.
Lionel Moore. And what had become of the Aivron and the Geinig now? their distant murmurs were easily drowned in the roar of enthusiasm with which the vast audience a mass of orange-hued faces they seemed across the footlights greeted the prima-donna and the popular young baritone. Nina was here also, in her subordinate part.
She had run up to the extreme edge of the footlights at the risk of teetering over, and had informed Sam through the medium of song to the huge delight of the audience, and to Sam's red-faced discomfiture that she liked his smile, and he was just her style, and just as cute as he could be, and just the boy for her.
You just did enough to set this darling girl alight. Knights and squires numberless will thank you. The idea of your reproaching yourself is monstrous. Why, there's no one thanks you more than she does. You stole her voice, which some may think a pity, but I don't, seeing that I would rather have her in a salon than before the footlights. Imagine my glory in her! she has become half cat!
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