I’m always excited when I find a newspaper story about the Hippodrome and instantly know that I want to write about it in the book. That’s what happened with my Monday find, “Birds of Various Feathers” from the Sunday edition of the Pittsburgh Post from October 4, 1908. I found it on newspapers.com but tracked down the original source, the New York Sun. The story has a different name, “Ballet Girls Now Birds,” and can be seen without a subscription through Chronicling America.
The article tells me a lot that I didn’t know about the backstage world of the Hippodrome, particularly the interactions between the ballet girls in the chorus, the dressers who get them in and out of costumes, and the wardrobe mistress who oversees everything, Frances Ziebarth (who I wrote about last summer). They all worked together to put on the ballet in the middle spot during fifth spectacular show at the Hippodrome, called “The Land of Birds.”
Two rows of bird ballerinas pose, showing off their costumes. From Life magazine, via Hathitrust.
The opening show was Sporting Days, notable for its onstage baseball game. The closer, Battle in the Skies, was a science-fiction story with airships and radium guns. In between, more than 200 chorus girls in elegant costumes performed in a ballet with a fairytale concept. A lumberjack’s daughter releases some birds that another workman has caught and caged. The hunter is angry; the little girl runs away and falls asleep in the forest. She dreams that avian companions take her to their land and dance for her. (Definitely in the same realm as the Nutcracker.) Hippodrome shows often included ballets, though the earlier ones were less about showcasing the physical prowess and beauty of particular star dancers (until Pavlova came in 1916) and more about gracefully moving large groups of women in attractive costumes.
Land of the Birds ballet girls with their “cold bottles,” the men who will take them to dinner
The newspaper story begins with a joke, illustrated in the picture above:
“They have a new name for the Johnnies who flit about the stage door at the Hippodrome these nights. They call them the cold bottles.”
This formulation reverses the usual phrase for Broadway men about town, who want to spend the night with a “hot bird and a cold bottle.” The hot bird, as you might suspect, is a double entendre that encompasses both the food you eat and the companion with whom you dine. (Chorus girls were also called “chickens” and in one revue got roasted on a spit, ugh.) The cold bottle is typically champagne, though here the funders of restaurant dinners get turned into consumables as well. The author of the newspaper article notes that since the ballet girls rehearsed this scene during the height of the summer heat, “the appellation ‘hot birds’ doesn’t seem so tremendously inappropriate as it otherwise might.” Living in the South and forever grateful for its omnipresent air-conditioning,I’m especially sympathetic to the discomfort of these performers who have to stick around NYC and learn their moves in heavy feathered costumes.
When the reporter asks one chorus girl, dressed in turquoise chiffon and a silk hat with pink trimmings, is a bird, the woman responds incredulously in Brooklynese, “Of course I’m a boyd. What’d you think I was? Goils, she wants to know if I’m a boyd, she does!” Some of the costumes are a bit more directly imitative, like the stork seen below. Some of the performers have a narrative role to play, while others are more decorative.
Stork design by Alfredo Edel via the Shubert Archive
The profile gave me such a clear sense of the silliness and camaraderie among the cast and crew. The woman who plays the stork has lost her prop baby, which one of the dressers sat on. When the baby is returned, the stork melodramatically thanks her for “My chile, my long lost chile!” I should note that this may be a riff on African American Vernacular English: Uncle Tom’s Cabin was among the most popular stage shows, after all. Though the theater audience was not racially segregated, the chorus girls in Hippodrome shows were all white or white-passing.
The dressers seem to be older women, and at least one is given an Irish lilt to her speech. One dresser recounts the story of the ballet to the reporter and then notes that she too had danced in the ballet in the era of Marie Taglioni and Fanny Ellsler; she’d worn a tarlatan skirt, but never a bird costume. I was happy to read this, since I don’t always have a sense of what happens to the ballet girls who age out of their profession.
Another place where the line between performer and costume shop worker was blurred: this story and another one two years later both note that when the chorus girls have down time between their onstage appearances, they sometimes use the Hippodrome sewing machines to make their own clothes. Frances Ziebarth says,
“You can tell how much harder the Bird Ballet is on the girls, when I tell you that last year that little paroquet in the corner made herself a complete set of lingerie and the cardinal was the envy of every bird in her set with a handmade outfit of twelve shirtwaists, all done right here in the dressing room between times. With the present ballet all the girls have time to make is changes — some of them have six during a performance. There’s no new lingerie and shirtwaists made this year, I can tell you.”
Even though they don’t have time to do their sewing in this production, the idea that chorus girls could use work equipment for their own ends made me smile. They are the ancestors of women copying their zines on the office Xerox machine and writing screenplays on work computers.
What this newspaper story really crystallized for me, though, was the need to think about the connection between the backstage labor of making a show and the onstage labor of performing it. That’s the subject of the awesome theater history I’m reading now, Working Backstage: A Cultural History and Ethnography of Technical Theater Labor by Christin Essin. So much of the Hippodrome aesthetic comes from collective labor and collective performance, from the prop makers to the ushers to the two hundred-plus ballet girls dressed as birds. I’m still thinking through the best structure for representing that collective labor in a book.