My Ears Are Bent

My Ears Are Bent

Joseph Mitchell

Language: English

Pages: 320

ISBN: 0375726306

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


As a young newspaper reporter in 1930s New York, Joseph Mitchell interviewed fan dancers, street evangelists, voodoo conjurers, not to mention a lady boxer who also happened to be a countess. Mitchell haunted parts of the city now vanished: the fish market, burlesque houses, tenement neighborhoods, and storefront churches. Whether he wrote about a singing first baseman for the Brooklyn Dodgers or a nudist who does a reverse striptease, Mitchell brilliantly illuminated the humanity in the oddest New Yorkers.

These pieces, written primarily for The World-Telegram and The Herald Tribune, highlight his abundant gifts of empathy and observation, and give us the full-bodied picture of the famed New Yorker writer Mitchell would become.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I’m O.K., Mr. Callahan.” A cough is unusual in a burlesque company, and colds are practically unknown. The hardihood of the overworked and underpaid burlesque girls is amazing. They work naked, sometimes in drafty houses, and they make quick changes in overheated dressing rooms and then run down cold stairways, but they are rarely under the weather. Mr. Callahan said the exercise they get makes them robust; stomping their way through four or five shows a day the girls get more exercise than a

long, however. “With a derrick they couldn’t get me from this city,” he said, snapping the pink elastic band around his left sleeve. “No difference if they make me Governor of California and give me with salary an automobile.” 2. FEMALE PUG The only lady prizefighter I ever saw was Countess Jeanne Vina La Mar. I saw her in a room at the St. Moritz. The room smelled like a gymnasium. She was wearing cleated shoes, gym pants, two sweaters and a sweatshirt. She had just come in from a jog

his draftsmanship and outlook influence most of his contemporaries in the field of the humorous drawing. He is by no means satisfied with his work. He quit drawing the Whoops Sisters, a pair of raucous, uninhibited ladies he originated in 1926, because he was afraid the customers were beginning to find them hackneyed. Lately he purchased a candid camera, a device found valuable by other cartoonists. He develops his own films, does his own enlargements. “I think of my drawing as reporting,” he

merely makes him want to stay home. His quarrelsomeness has been monumental ever since the days when the Four Cohans used to be chosen instead of a stable of acrobats to open a vaudeville ball, occasions when his mother, father and sister had to restrain him from leaving the theater. At the close of almost every vaudeville engagement he used to rush up to the manager of the theater and shout, “Sometime I’m going to come back here and buy this theater just so I can throw you into the street.” He

Mr. Friedman is a dead barrel of beer now,” said The House as a committee of customers wrapped up the drunken newsdealer in two tablecloths and carried him out. An old printer spends whole days and nights in the place, holding to the bar with one hand and making oratorical gestures with the other. He makes a speech which never ends, muttering to himself, and no one knows what he is talking about, except that he is denouncing something. “What’s the matter with him?” new customers ask, staring.

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