| Not only do things get worse before they get better some things are best when they start bad and stay that way. Evidence the Cherry Sisters. It's 1896: no radio, no TV; motion pictures as popular entertainment still a few years away. Berliner (discs) and Edison (cylinders) are laying the groundwork for the record industry. No cars, no planes. The epicenter of public amusement is the theater. Itinerant performers singers, jugglers, dog acts, pianists, minstrels, and seltzer-siphon buffoons work the circuit known as "Vaudeville." There were stars, like Nora Bayes, Fanny Brice, and Sophie Tucker and there were the Cherry Sisters. Their closest late 20th-century analogue might be aboriginal rock legends the Shaggs minus the talent or a reduced-rate Del Rubio Triplets with even lousier makeup. The sisters Effie, Addie, Ella, Jessie and Elizabeth, of Marion, Iowa were by contemporary accounts the worst act in vaudeville. Unadulterated stinkeroo. Their show, Something Good, Something Sad , was so atrocious it triggered a perverse public hysteria: it played to sold-out New York houses for ten weeks. It put impresario Oscar Hammerstein's career in turnaround and rescued his floundering Olympia Music Hall from the brink of bankruptcy. November 16 marks the 100th anniversary of the sisters' "heralded" opening on the Great White Way. Don't bother sending a card the whole family has gone to the one place even FedEx doesn't deliver. The last of the sisters all childless spinsters died in 1944. Their brother Nathan went to Chicago in 1885 and was never heard from again. | |
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