Lunar Follies

OCEAN OF STORMS

A number of large television sets — seven, to be precise — show, continuously, the same film, variously titled The Past, Rock Island Rock, or Celebrity Toodle-oo. Each is played, if that’s the word, at a different speed, if that’s the word, so that the imagery, as well as the narrative, such as it is, in each film is identical, the differing speeds at which this imagery and narrative are deployed, if that’s the word, enforcing the sense or idea that the viewer, the ideal viewer, is being presented with seven different films. This is posolutely correct, a construction facilitator notes, using a whimsical coinage, if that’s the word, said to be invented by Joe Penner or Ed Wynn on the old vaudeville circuit. They, and others, often played the Palace, nicely named, since playing the Palace was thought of as making it big, getting the big break, making the big time, hitting it big, and grabbing the brass ring. Betty Grable, Alice Faye, Ginger Rogers, Ruby Keeler, and Jeanette MacDonald all hit the big time and got the big break in cinematic representations of vaudeville days, those glorious days that will come no more. Whatever, by God, happened to the melted snows? One of the most famous of the cinematic versions of vaudeville stars’ lives and times was played, if that’s the word, quite improbably, by Esther Williams, or so they say. Miss Williams, on loan from one of her ocean-liner-Palm Beach-Sun Valley-Rio movies, the latter group nicely augmented by such reliable plodders as Xavier Cugat, José Iturbi, Ethel Smith, and Danny Kaye — not to mention Virginia Mayo, Jane Powell, and Kathryn Grayson and her technicolor bust — was uncommonly fetching, if not flagrantly erotic, in black tights and rhinestone tiara. Her rendition of “Waiting at the Church,” in a game albeit pathetic Cockney accent was universally greeted by awed silence. The title of this film, which told, not too courageously, the story of Grace DesMoines, was Rock Island Waltz. As intelligence concerning these facts permeates the viewing room, the television sets, one at a time, display, on their glistening blue ponds of screens, snow, and nothing but snow, which is understood by all to be unreal, i.e., it is not snow in any way, shape, or form. It is but a manifestation of interference, if that’s the word, and its grey, black, and white, nervously mobile horizontal lines remind the viewer of the lost snows of something or other. Say, vaudeville.