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MYSELF WHEN YOUNG

sas City see fewer good plays now than Zanesville, Ohio, and Springfield, Missouri, did twenty years since. Booth, at his zenith, played such towns as Bowling Green, Kentucky, and Saginaw, Michigan.

I was about to say that one-night stands were history except for repertory shows, Tom shows, medicine shows, and the like, which play under canvas and still wheedle a living out of the towns of five hundred to ten thousand, when I happened to glance at the route list in the Billboard. There, in the second week of July, 1925, I found Miss Blanche Bates in "Mrs. Partridge Presents", a moderate Broadway success of last season, listed as playing Pueblo and Grand Junction, Colorado, Price and Logan, Utah, and Pocatello and Idaho Falls, Idaho, all within seven days. Here are one-night stands as actors knew them before Hollywood.

Pueblo may continue to see infrequent number-two and number-three road companies in new plays, but it is a safe hazard that Price, Logan, Grand Junction, Pocatello and Idaho Falls have not watched another Broadway cast headed by a star in a recent success in at least ten years. Many larger towns between Maine

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