Category Archives: The Life Fantastic

The Life Fantastic, Question Three

Liza, how did a dead canary inspire you to write this novel?

Vaudeville has fascinated me since I was a small child. That’s when my father told me the romantic story about my great-grandmother, Carrie Lebo. She stole away from home in the night to elope with a vaudeville musician, leaving her pet canary behind. The family found the bird dead in its cage the next morning and declared it a bad omen.

William Patton, Carrie’s sweetheart, was a charming red-headed violinist. Carrie had a lovely voice and played the piano. The couple sang and played with a vaudeville troupe that moved from town to town, performing in small theatres. They had two children: a son; and my paternal grandmother, Thelma June.

The couple’s elopement created a scandal in the small town of Shreve, Ohio, as did their divorce a few years later. Growing up, I often asked my grandmother about her parents. She told me that Carrie loved to sing, and that she was a skilled seamstress and music teacher. Although my grandmother had inherited her parents’ love of music (she also played piano), she refused to speak about her father, except to mention his red hair, and the fact that he seldom visited. Sadly, she was ashamed of her parents’ history.

For my grandfather George Ketchum, who started working when he was eleven, vaudeville was the only entertainment he could afford on his meager earnings. From the time I was four or five, Grandpa and I sang vaudeville songs together. He taught me silly, off-color tunes such as “Everybody works but Father, he sits around all day,” (here’s Groucho Marx singing it) and “There lay Brown, upside down, lapping up the whiskey off the floor.” Grandpa described what it was like to sit in the cheapest gallery seats, high above the stage, enjoying the shows with a rowdy audience.

From the National Trust for Historical Preservation, credit: Huw Webber

Thanks to my grandparents’ stories, I wondered: what was life like for vaudeville performers of all ages and backgrounds? One summer, while driving across the country, I stopped in the town of Leadville, high in Colorado’s Rocky Mountains, and visited the Tabor Opera House, which has been restored to its former grandeur. As my footsteps echoed in the quiet aisles, I looked up at the empty stage, with its beautiful forest backdrop, and tried to imagine the theatre packed with miners and other residents who were grateful for entertainment in their remote mining town. Since my grandmother couldn’t—or wouldn’t—tell her parents’ story, I decided to invent one myself.

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The Life Fantastic, Question Two

Liza, why are you so interested in theater?

Ever since I was young, I have loved theater, music, and dance. The arts were an essential part of our family life, growing up. Music was always playing on our living room turntable, and our parents sang in the car with us on long drives. When our Nashville cousins came for summer visits, with their guitars, ukuleles, and their wonderful collection of songs, we sang for hours.

My brother and I made up stories about our stuffed animals when we were young, and my friends and I invented characters and put on small plays. With the Ransom family—six boys whose mother loved theater—we put on plays (such as “Winnie-the-Pooh”) and played charades late into the night. I also liked dance, as this picture shows. I have no memory of the story behind it, but I recognize the dance studio in Vermont, where I spent childhood summers. I must have been about seven.

Here I am, dancing in Vermont. I’m the dancer on the left.

In “Ghost Train,” I’m the actress seated on the chair.

In Junior High, I sang the lead of Mabel in “The Pirates of Penzance” (Gilbert and Sullivan), and in high school, I performed in the melodramatic play, “Ghost Train.” (My most vivid and embarrassing memory of that performance was hearing my father’s laugh ring out from the front row of the audience. Until that moment, I hadn’t realized the play was a farce.) During my senior year, I was head of the Drama Club and often went to see theater in Boston, some of it experimental. I had a minor role in Shaw’s “Major Barbara,” probably the most difficult role I would ever play—because I was onstage for the entire play, but only had four lines. I had to act without speaking.

After high school, I attended The Neighborhood Playhouse in New York City for a summer, and there I was introduced to Method Acting. In a funny way, that eight-week course—where I had to improvise and inhabit roles of people totally different from myself —was excellent training for writing novels. Just as in fiction, I had to imagine what it would be like to inhabit the body, mind, and emotions of another person. I had to invent that person’s history, family, and experience—not easy for a young adult who didn’t know much about the wider world. (Just out of high school, my fellow students were all adults working day jobs while trying to break into the theater.)

I was a camp drama coach for three summers, but by the end of my first year in college, where I took a terrific writing class, I knew I would become a writer. I’ve never lost my love for live theater and I’m lucky to live just outside Boston, a first-class theater city.

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The Life Fantastic, Question One

Liza, what is The Life Fantastic about?

It is 1913 and vaudeville is America’s most popular form of entertainment. Thousands of theatres and opera houses across the country host vaudeville troupes, including the Princess Theater in Brattleboro, Vermont. There, fifteen-year-old Teresa LeClair—who has a “voice like a nightingale”—remembers the thrill of singing onstage as a child. But her parents gave up life on the road, and her father has decided that Teresa, blessed with perfect pitch, should drop out of school and work in the tuning rooms of the local organ factory.

Determined to escape, Teresa wins an amateur singing contest in Vermont and steals away on the night train to New York. She hopes to become a star on Broadway’s “Great White Way.” She has no idea of the challenges that lie ahead, and her younger brother, Pascal (a budding juggler) complicates her adventure by stowing away on the same train. In the city, Teresa struggles to follow her dream and care for her brother, while fearing that her father will find them and force her to return home.

Brattleboro, Vermont today … the historic district

Luckily, a more experienced vaudevillian named Maeve—who performs with a troupe of circus dogs—takes Teresa and Pascal under her wing. She coaches them as they perform in two-bit, amateur night competitions. In New York, Teresa runs into Pietro Jones and his father, talented African American dancers who had also performed in Brattleboro. Teresa and Pietro become competitors as well as prickly friends. At a time when young black men could be lynched for simply looking at a white girl, Pietro understands, better than Teresa, the danger of their relationship. As they compete in one contest after another, Teresa’s father tracks her down in New York—and demands that she return with her brother to Vermont. Instead, Teresa slips away again, wins a place on vaudeville’s Silver Circuit, and travels west with Pietro, his father, Maeve—and the dogs.

W.E.B. DuBois

Performing in Western cities and towns, their vaudeville troupe appears in five or six shows a day. They “jump” from one town to the next, sleeping on trains or in fleabag hotels. Every performer risks audience disapproval, which can cause a stage manager to give them “the hook”—and send them packing. As they travel, Teresa’s eyes are opened to the discrimination her black friends face on the road. She also learns, from Pietro, about a new movement for equal rights growing under the leadership of the great civil rights activist and writer, W.E.B. DuBois.

Teresa’s friendship with Pietro deepens to attraction, even as they realize they could never be together. When Pietro’s father becomes ill and can’t perform, Teresa and Pietro sing a duet onstage—with dire consequences for their careers and their safety. Teresa’s struggle to find her voice onstage and in her life, far from the support of her family, takes place against a complex backdrop of American history.

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Vermont’s Estey Organ Company

Fifteen-year-old Teresa’s father works at the Estey Organ Company. Teresa has perfect pitch, which means she can identify a musical note, or sing a named note without hearing any music. This talent would help her get a job in the factory’s tuning rooms, where organ pipes are tested for accuracy. Teresa’s mother believes the job would destroy her daughter’s beautiful voice. And Teresa knows she would never survive, locked up in the factory all day long.

Based in Brattleboro, Vermont, this website serves as the digital museum for the Estey Organ Company, with photos and history about the once-famous manufacturer of parlor organs that graced the homes of many families and churches across the country.

An Estey pump organ. Notice the Stradivarius posed on top of the organ.

An Estey parlor organ with pipes! Can you imagine the sound in your parlor?

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Vaudeville Stars in Blackface

In The Life Fantastic, Pietro rebels against a common practice: applying “blackface” in order to appear onstage in vaudeville theaters. Smearing burnt cork on one’s face and hands was meant to obscure the skin color of the actor underneath the makeup. It was a carryover from the days of black minstrel shows. For Pietro and many other black performers, it was demeaning. And yet, African American actors, singers, dancers, and comedians appearing in blackface opened the door for black performers who would eventually go on stage without cork.

Stephen Foster Hard Times sheet music

Songs from this era, especially those of Stephen Foster, were favorites on the vaudeville stage. Yet they’re seldom sung today because of his lyrics, which reflect a time of racial intolerance. A number of historians share their feelings about Stephen Foster’s lyrics.

“It’s part of black history and it’s part of American history and you can’t change history. It’s good to reflect on it. I think it’s more important to study history as it is, lest we ever repeat ourselves.” –Nancy Griffith, musician

Learn more: (American Experience on PBS, “Blackface Minstrelsy”)

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Vaudeville Stars, Fred and Adele Astaire

Footwork: the story of Fred and Adele Astaire Fred Astaire personified grace and elegance for several generations. He and his sister Adele began their careers on the vaudeville stage as children. (My mother, who grew up to dance professionally with Martha Graham, dreamed of taking Adele’s place, when she was a child.)

Here’s a picture book biography that tells the story of their beginning: Footwork: the story of Fred and Adele Astaire, by Roxane Orgill and Stéphane Jorisch.

Mental Floss shares “14 Toe-Tapping Facts about Fred Astaire,” which add depth to other biographies of this mega-star.

This slideshow features still photos of Fred and Adele from their days in vaudeville. And here’s one of my favorite dance routines from the brilliant Mr. Astaire, dancing with a coat rack in the movie Royal Wedding!

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A fascination with theater, dance, and storytelling

Many years ago, a little girl was born in Vermont. As she grew, she loved to make up stories and act them out. She enjoyed singing, dancing, and dressing up as the characters from the stories that she and her friends created. They might be royalty in the Middle Ages, or Greek goddesses, or Vermont farmers, or female versions of the characters in The Little Rascals. Like her mother—a professional dancer—the girl liked to tell a story through movement and music.

That’s me on the far left. I have no memory of what the dance was.

In “Ghost Train,” I’m the actress seated on the chair.

In Junior High, the girl’s dramatic play turned serious. She sang the role of Mabel in Gilbert and Sullivan’s operetta, “The Pirates of Penzance,” and performed in neighborhood plays. In high school, she had the lead in an old-fashioned melodrama (“Ghost Train”) and was president of the Drama Club. She went to theater school in New York City after high school, coached kids in drama during her college summers, and dreamed of a life onstage.

Instead—and happily—she became a writer.

How does this story relate to a novel about vaudeville, which takes place more than a century ago—when stars like Eva Tanguay, George Walker, and Bert Williams were all the rage?

Follow my blog to find out! I’ll be sharing information about the history of vaudeville, the suffrage movement, and the fight for racial and gender equality over the coming months.

Learn more about my newest book, The Life Fantastic.

Eva Tanguary, George Walker, Bert Williams

At left, Eva Tanguay, vaudeville performer. (Billy Rose Theatre Division, The New York Public Library. “Eva Tanguay” New York Public Library Digital Collections. Accessed December 5, 2016.) On the right, George Walker and Bert Williams, vaudeville performers and theater producers (public domain).