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THE SHOW-DOWN   Page 13

IN AND AROUND NEW YORK
By MAXIE MAXWELL

Hello! Hello! here we are in the midst of some reports from our sister city, Rochester, Al. Smith, mag representative was on the sick list last month... Glad he has a speedy recovery. Met several performers from the Gotham city, who are appearing in the various clubs around here. At the Cotton Club is Mabel Cooper, Edith Henrietta and Johnson, Emma Miller Ruby Logan, Strawberry and Russell who all round out a fine show. Bill Geder and his band are swinging on down. This spot is a black and tan one. Conversed with Jeanette, who was the former partner of Seymore, now deceased. She is still doing her male character, and its a killer. I was greeted warmly on my return to Rochester after more than a year's absence. Charlie Banks, is Emceeing in mellow spot. Slim and Ralph closed at the Chatteau Club, swanky ofay spot... Bardo's Club has the largest of all Sepia revues. The show includes: Buddy Dole, late of Noble Sissle's aggregation, Blanche Bowman, strip teaser, Laura Watson, torch singer. Alberta Dusty, Elino and Ida Lamb, dancers, Woodrow Wilson, Skating dancer, Aubey Ali, contortionist, and my partner and I, who are known as the Two Kadets... Made a jump into Buffalo, saw Abdeen Ali, ex-partner of mine, who is now filling an engagement in the Harlem Uproar in New York City. His act is great, quite differnent from average dance acts you see today. Shelton Brooks and Charles Ray are appearing at Club Harlem... Ike Johnson, is still the mayor of Rochester in Bronze... When I left the Apple it was jumping, with a few spots opening... Will jot more next month...
Adios

FROM A BASEMENT WINDOW 
By Charles Moore

Harlem is a strange place! Anything can happen here. We pour into it from small towns and farms from north and from south, from east and from west. We come here with something in mind, having heard that New York is the place to make money--with those half baked dreams, which more often than not, are soon forgotten we get here.

We are the secretaries, the chauffeurs, the clerks, the college grads, and the artists. We somehow thought we had a career ahead of us. We would write--we would paint--we would act--we would sing--we would dance. Hadn't we talent--Didn't our local papers publish our poetry? Didn't the high school intermediates applaud our singing and our dance routines? Didn't our little community theatres say we had definite talent? Yes, we had careers ahead of us--and Harlem was our Mecca.

So, we come to New York. We live in small dingy rooms. We cook our meals, if we are fortunate enough to have gas plate. We had thought we'd have potted flowers in the window, but what we really have is a bottle of cream and a piece of butter. We try to make a living typing letters, or manuscripts, waiting tables in restaurants or singing for tips in joints, or running errands for coffee and sandwiches. Sometimes there isn't money for rent so we are put out. Then some more fortunate friend still has his room, so we sleep in shifts. Our host, having preference, sleeps from let us say VB to R. A. M. Meanwhile, we catch a late party somewhere or sit in a cafe or club. The bed is ours for the next eight hours. And so on.

It is, we find, a pretty sordid life. Not at all the thing we had planned. We meant to get much done but we somehow don't get around to it. After the first few rejection slips, we give up trying to sell our manuscripts, our pictures don't make the galleries, the producers don't think so much of our routines.

So, off evenings, we gather somewhere and over endless cigarettes and bad liquor we talk about world affairs, travel, music, painting and art with a capitol A. We don't know what we're talking about but it doesn't matter. 

Some of us are on relief. Some of us are living on our friends, a meal here, a cigarette there, a bed where we can get it.

Then, we do one or two things. We either continue being chiselers and artistic bums--and sleeping in borrowed bug-ridden beds and drinking bad liquor until we have lost our perspective entirely and wind up in the psychopathic ward at Bellevue, or in a tubercular sanitarium upstate somewhere--and that's the end of that.

Or, we go out and get a job. We go back to the offices--where we once were stenographers, actors and clerks--we can be again. A pay check at the end of the week makes us remember what we had lost sight of these months--years. We move to clean rooms, we eat three meals a day. We sleep eight hours a night. Perhaps we pick up our pen or brush again--or perhaps we don't and decide it is just as well.

And we get enough money ahead to buy a return trip to the small-town home we left, we go back--and marry somebody we went to school with--and Harlem and Sugar Hill is a strange dream we once had.