The American Male By Ranking McIntyre THE poor creature is born. He grows. During his youth he has the measles, mumps, and chicken pox. He goes to school and quite soon he is grown up. Perhaps he marries or joins a club. He buys some furniture and an average priced automobile and a few subscriptions to magazines. He mows the lawn on Sundays for the exercise or else he plays golf. If he plays golf he spends most of the time hunting the golf ball. In the winter he gets his exercise by shoveling snow. His friends call him Rupart, which irritates him, though Rupart is his name. He attends fairs, conventions, business meetings, dog fights, and lodge meetings. He is called upon to make extemporaneous speeches at banquets. His good clothes smell of moth balls. He always loses just one glove. His shoes pinch and his hat doesn't fit him. He has to shave twice daily, or he should. Dentists pull out his teeth and surgeons dig out his tonsils. He misses trains, busses, and streetcars. He fills out questionnaires. He believes everything he reads. He knows a little about everything, but not very much about any one thing. He stalls his car in traffic. He fixes flats on lonely country roads. His business goes from worse to "worser", and if it isn't that, the government takes away his money. After fifteen years his secretary quits and gets married. He has colds in his head which settle finally, after a week or two, in his chest, and there they reside for the season, or until he gets others in his head. He has hay fever. He is advised to give up liquor and tobacco. He tries. When he sleeps his own nasal warbling awakens him. His hair evaporates under a barrage of hair tonic. He squashes his fingers in doors, windows, and under hammers. If he has servants, they hide his paper and glasses. One day he comes home to find that his favorite easy-chair has been replaced by a pink twisted-metal one. His relations send him neckties and clothes brushes for Christmas. He waits to hear his favorite radio program, but instead Junior listens to "Dick Tracy." People mispronounce and misspell his name. He has several "half-way" hobbies. He attends bridge parties where he nibbles carrots. His wife gives away his favorite old hat. Mosquitoes poison him. College reunions make him sad. He buys every kind of insurance except that for flood and then what happens? A flood. He acts as pall bearer at funerals. He travels a little but soon hurries back to his "rut". He puts on weight and joins the local gym to reduce. Instead, he gains weight and a case of athlete's foot. He thinks that he understands politics. He has to serve on juries. He brags, bullies, and babbles. At times he argues with hard-faced agents of the government over his income tax. Neighbors borrow his tools, books, and bathing suit. He forgets such things as mailing his wife's letters or putting the cat out. His dog bites Mr. Jones, the man just up the street, and Mr. Jones sues him. Perhaps his mother-in-law comes to live with him. She then helps him to tell his stories. He hates boiled potatoes, but his wife has them four times a week. His neighbor's chickens thrive on his radish patch. He remarks that times were better in 19-. One day he discovers he is old. He retires and slowly becomes deaf; though he isn't as deaf as everyone thinks. His relations put him in a rocking chair and feed him soft-boiled eggs. He is put to bed early. Then one day he falls down the cellar steps, and breaks his neck, thus passing his belongings on to another crop. Yaqui Town (Continued from Page 14) few thirsty looking palm trees typify "desert life" as the easterner imagines it. He often takes kodak pictures of his intended scenes, paints in his studio, and returns to the original site merely for final touches. He tried that technique in Yaqui Town, but it didn't work out so well. These Indians have an acute distrust of anything which they do not understand and the kodak seems to be one of the white man's major mysteries. On his first trip out there Burdell had no sooner taken his camera from the car when several bucks approached him and gruntingly suggested that he take no pictures in Yaqui Town. Burdell stuck out his chin a notch or two and proceeded to take a picture of one of the more picturesque dwellings. (He showed me exactly which one it was later.) The bucks immediately exchanged words for action and proceeded to "whale the tar" out of Burdell. Burdell's no slouch, but things were going pretty badly for him when the service station proprietor, a white man, appeared on the scene and helped him get back into his car and under way. He was minus his camera, a bit of epidermis, and was very willing to believe that there are Indians and Indians. That was several years before he took me out to see the town, and in the interim he completed many scenes of Yaqui Town. However, he's still a marked man, so most of his sketching has taken place from his car or with one eye on it for a speedy retreat. That a group of human beings can exist there is amazing in itself. The scarcity of water is apparent on all sides. The gourd vines droop over the squalid buildings, the meagre patches of corn rattle with dryness, and even the pigs and chickens and dust-covered children seem stunted from lack of water. These Indians live almost entirely by Indian customs and Indian justice. Very little that occurs among them is known twenty-five miles away in Phoenix. They have had just enough civilization to harm them. Liquor and the stupidity of ignorant white men have utterly erased all signs of the native nobility of their race. Burdell was telling me the gory details of the latest Yaqui Town fracas as we drove around the barren little village in the foothills. That, combined with the unusual appearance of the place, had my nerves in a state to anticipate almost anything. We stopped at the combined service station, general store, and post office for some gas. As if by magic a group of Indians appeared and began discussing us. Or at least they said things and pointed in our direction. Just before we were ready to drive off, one of the bucks approached the car and began talking to the proprietor of the station. He seemed rather upset and pointed at us repeatedly. The proprietor listened for a moment, then turned to Burdell and said, "You'd better go now." I was too excited to grasp either the full significance of the scene, or its complete lack of importance. I only know I couldn't get Burdell to say much about Yaqui Town after that. And I still can't decide just how much of my opinion of the place is based on fact, and how much on a very fertile imagination. page twenty Playing Notes and Thinking By Glen Wade I am sitting on the elevated stand where the orchestra sits. The time is nearly 9:00 P. M. The dance is about to begin. Scattered couples talk in groups, waiting for the music. They are the ones who come early to enjoy the entire dance. Most of the crowd that will soon fill the hall prefer to come later in the evening. I play trumpet with the orchestra. There are eight members who will play tonight: two brass (trumpet and trombone), three reeds, and three rhythm. Last summer we organized, and have been going ever since. Conversation amongst us has ceased. We are about to play our first number, which is our theme song. Our theme, Artie Shaw's arrangement of "Night and Day," is played both at the beginning of our dances and at the end. Some bands play their themes only at the end. Four muffled beats by the drummer starts us off. After the introduction, in which crescendos, pianissimos and fortes are introduced, our ad lib clarinet man comes to the front of the orchestra to play Artie Shaw's solo. Our clarinet man is one of the three high school fellows in the orchestra. Four others, including myself, are college men; the other, the oldest and most serious-minded of us, makes a living by painting and drawing funny cartoons. I see only the back of our clarinetist, for the brass sit directly behind the reeds. I've often wondered how he looked from the front standing there and playing. He plays his graceful solo, and I feel kind of sad when I hear it. This fellow has been offered a job with a better orchestra and has accepted. He is playing with us tonight, probably the last time, because we have not yet been able to break in a new man for the position. I believe the others feel the same sort of anguish I do when they think of this. Now the tenor sax man takes his solo. He is another of the high-school students. He is one of the quietest and most bashful fellows I know. This trait is not found in many swing-band men. His playing does not have the brilliance or drive of the clarinet solo. It has the quality of quiet smoothness instead. It reflects the disposition of the player, and the contrast it makes gives variety to the piece. Another short clarinet break and the trombone stands to take his solo. He plays it straight and smooth, which is different from his usual style. Most often his playing has emphasis and bluster. He is another college man. I have had him in my classes and have studied geology with him as well as music. Girls in the dancing audience often flirt with him behind their partners' backs. It is my turn now to stand up, for we have reached the trumpet break. I wonder how I would be described if one of the others were writing this. The piece is ended after another clarinet break, more crescendos, and a lot of mostly loud notes. In between dances our drummer plays short, spontaneous drum breaks. Other orchestras often have the pianist do this job. The drummer, the third high-school student, is the youngest of the group. He practices with phonograph records when not practicing with us. Sometimes he is disappointed to a high degree of melancholy by the differences he finds in the recorded bands and ourselves. He is the erratic one of the orchestra. It's lucky for us the other two rhythm men are more experienced and likewise steadier. The pianist, for instance, is a college man and has been with orchestras for years. The guitar player is the serious-minded cartoonist. Both play the same kind of job, almost without variation, dance after dance. The dance goes on. Sometimes the orchestra is good, even brilliant. Sometimes it is lousy. It's a funny thing, no matter how we play it seems to make little difference to the dancers. Yes, now and then there is some applause and often we get requests. But I've played jobs in which one number was great and the next all messed up, and the response of the dancers was the same in both instances. Maybe they don't pay too much attention to those things. The dance is nearing its end. There have been four requests made, two for "In the Mood" and two for "Oh, Johnny!" We are playing better now than at the start. This is because there is a larger crowd. The larger the crowd the better we like it. We come to our theme song again, almost sadly. We play it about the same as before, maybe with a little more drive. The dance is over, but some of the dancers don't know it. They stand about in the hall talking and expecting more music. When they look and see the orchestra packing up they are not pleased. Soon, however, the hall is emptied of all save ourselves. Then we go and the lights are out. Soup to Nuts...Especially Nuts (Continued from Page 5) Mistaking it for his cue, he whirled into the flute obbligato scheduled for the next number and completely exhausted himself, making it necessary for the con-ductor to hum the obbligato while Tweep retired to the musicians' restroom to have his wrists rubbed. It is a matter of scientific fact that Mr. Bach's consequent whirlings in his tomb were recorded in a seismograph in Yokahama. Eating reaches perhaps its most ambitious proportions when accompanying reading. There's nothing in the world quite so inviting as a good book, an easy chair by the fire, and a portable eight-course dinner. This pastime has handicaps, however, such as the frequent interruptions if one is eating something which one must keep his eye on while biting, or the danger of suddenly acquiring a lap full of something sticky, or the eternal problem of what to do with apple cores. The natural solution to the apple core perplexity is the simple expedient of removing the inedible portion beforehand, as in the case of fresh peaches. It is my custom to pit (or unpit, or depit) a gross or thereabouts of golden peaches, then bend into a big chair, open up my Philo Vance, and, guided by a mental picture of the fruit's chain arrangement along the arms and back of the chair, reach out for the nourishment without looking up. The objection to this system is the ever-present danger of mistaking some definitely inedible article a souvenir ash-tray, for instance for the food. I have personally swallowed (1) a ping-pong ball mistaken for marshmallows, (2) a bronze statuette mistaken for Christmas hardtack, and (3) an old house slipper mistaken for God-knows-what. While absorbed in "The Corpse with the Dirty Finger Nails," a female acquaintance of mine unscrewed a Mazda bulb from a nearby lamp, devoured it, and a few moments later looked up to ask where we got such lousy pears. Speaking of peaches, I suppose I should warn you about the fuzz. Because I neglected to wash a peck of peaches, my face became luxuriantly fuzzy. My Aunt Edith, passing my room, looked in, thought I was the ghost of my late grandfather, fainted, and fell down a flight of stairs. The doctor soaked us two hundred bucks, which is a lot of money to pay for anybody, especially Aunt Edith. People should eat in restaurants. page twenty-one