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The Boscoe & Hartwell Combined Touring Company
— direct from a triumphant engagement at the Cincinnati Opera House —
PETALS & PISTOLS
A Sparkling New Comedy of Country Hearts & Drawing-Room Misadventure · in Three Acts
Tuesday · Wednesday · Thursday Evenings — June 16 · 17 · 18, 1925 — Curtain at 8 sharp
The Bijou Theatre · Plum & Vine · Millbrook, Indiana
with Miss Coralee Bigsby · Mr. Frances Pell · The Hartwell Family Orchestra · Specialty Dancing between Acts
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Friend — you typed the word. Here is what I wanted you to see.
Up on the wall above the cabinet I have pinned the broadside the Boscoe people sent down ahead of their week with us. I read it every morning before I open the shop. It is, I think, the best of them — burgundy ink still tacky in places, the gold border laid by hand, the company name set in three different faces because the printer in Cincinnati had run out of the big serif and improvised. That is the kind of object a programme is. Not a souvenir of something past. A herald of something arriving.
Here is what I want you to know plainly: a touring company pulls into our depot at four in the afternoon, sets a stage in eight hours, and by curtain we — farmers, schoolteachers, the postmaster, the children freshly scrubbed — are sitting under one roof watching a story together. Without these companies, this town has no theater. None. The nearest standing house is sixty miles east. These programmes you are flipping through are not keepsakes of a lost world. They are receipts of an essential one, still in motion, still rolling in on the four-o'clock, still raising the curtain Tuesday at eight.
When the orchestra cuts its first chord and the house lights drop, every face in town tilts the same direction at once. That is the thing the programmes record. That is the thing worth keeping. Come around to the shop any evening — I'll show you the trunk.
Yours in the gallery, — Otis Bramwell, 47 E. Plum St., Millbrook · Tuesday next, save me a seat in row F