prano
in it, y'understand, it seemed to me they could of cut down on the
working time without hurting the quality of the goods in the slightest.
There's always a good fifteen minutes wasted in such operas where a
feller in the orchestra plays a little something on the flute and the
coloratura soprano sings the same music on the stage, the idee being to
show that you couldn't tell the difference between the feller playing
the flute and the coloratura soprano except the feller playing the flute
has all his clothes on. Then, again, during the death-bed scene in the
last act they kill a whole lot of time also."

"Do you mean to say there's a death-bed scene in every one of them
operas?" Morris inquired.

"Practically," Abe replied. "There ain't many grand operas where both
the tenor and the soprano sticks it out alive till the end of the last
act, Mawruss. Tenors, in particular, is awful risks, Mawruss, which I
bet yer that eighty per cent. of the times I seen Caruso he either
passed away along about quarter past eleven after an awful hard spell of
singing, or give you the impression that he wasn't going to survive the
soprano more than a couple of days at the outside."

"And yet some people couldn't understand why everybody takes in the
Winter Garden or Ziegfeld's Follies," Morris commented.

"Of course I don't say that the audience suffers as much as if it was in
the English language, but even when a lady dies in French or Italian I
couldn't enjoy it, neither," Abe said.

"It seems to me, Abe, that a feller which goes often on grand opera is
lucky if he understands only English," Morris observed.

"That's what you would naturally think, Mawruss," Abe agreed, "and yet
there is people which is so anxious that they shouldn't miss none of
the tenor's last words that they actually go to work and buy for
twenty-five cents in the lobby a translation of the Italian operas,
which I got stung that way only once, because to follow from the English
translation what the singers is saying on the stage in Italian, Mawruss,
a feller could be a combination of a bloodhound and a mind-reader,
y'understand, and even then he would get twisted. For instance, Caruso
comes out with a couple hundred assorted tenors and bassos, and so far
as any human being could tell which don't understand Italian, Mawruss,
he begs them that they shouldn't go out on strike right in the middle of
the busy season, in particular when times is so hard and every