Back in 1919, Vaudeville was a very big part of Show Business. Our story is about The Donahues, a very little part of vaudeville.
Mr. Clark, vaudeville is dead. Thank God, my father isn’t.
I need your help, Louis Minsky. My daughter will not be welcome in my home if she stays the night to dance upon your son’s stage. There is a train in 51 minutes. You must tell your son to see she is on it.
Louis, this looks like the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
Your mother mates out of season.
I guess we could all use more mates.
I thought he was only interested in clocks?
Mr. Holcroft, your father was a complicated man, and the word complicated doesn’t begin to describe him.
That was my father’s final joke, I guess. A man tells his stories so many times that he becomes the stories. They live on after him. And in that way he becomes immortal.
Do you know how few vampires have the stamina for immortality? How quickly they perish of their own will. The world changes; we do not. Therein lies the irony that finally kills us.
Bleh, bleh, bleh!
There aren’t many people you can talk to this way. So you keep it to yourself. You walk around with everything bottled up.
You know, in college I passed for a genius. They couldn’t get out the college magazine without one of my stories. Boy, was I hot. Hemingway stuff. I reached my peak when I was 19. Sold a piece to the Atlantic Monthly, reprinted in the Readers Digest. Who wants to stay in college when he’s Hemingway? My mother bought me a brand new typewriter and I moved right in on New York. Well, the first thing I wrote, that didn’t quite come off. And the second I dropped, the public wasn’t ready for that one. I started a third and a fourth. Only, by then, somebody began to look over my shoulder and whisper, in a thin, clear voice, like the E-string on a violin, “Don Birnam,” he whispered, “is not good enough. Not that way. How about a couple of drinks to set him on his feet, huh?” So, I had a couple. Oh, what a great idea that was! That made all the difference. Suddenly, I could see the whole thing. The tragic sweep of the great novel, beautifully proportioned. But, before I could really grab it and throw it down on paper, the drinks would wear off and everything would be gone, like a mirage. Then, there was despair and the drink to counterbalance despair and then one to counterbalance the counterbalance.
Wanda, do you have any idea what it’s like being English? Being so correct all the time, being so stifled by this dread of, of doing the wrong thing, of saying to someone “Are you married?” and hearing “My wife left me this morning,” or saying, uh, “Do you have children?” and being told they all burned to death on Wednesday. You see, Wanda, we’ll all terrified of embarrassment. That’s why we’re so… dead. Most of my friends are dead, you know, we have these piles of corpses to dinner. But you’re alive, God bless you, and I want to be, I’m so fed up with all this. I want to make love with you, Wanda. I’m a good lover - at least, used to be, back in the early 14th century. Can we go to bed?
Don’t worry about the way the world’s run, lad. Enjoy it while you’re young.
I wish I were big.
And you, young Skywalker; we shall watch your career with great interest.
Hey, he’s old, we’re young, and that’s life.
People say youth is wasted on the young. I disagree. I believe wisdom is wasted on the old. All you can do is part with it, but very few will take it, least of all the people closest to you.
Old man, how is it that you hear these things?
Young man, how is it that you do not?