Zine 1: Do Me Justice: The Mary Wallopers, Arena, and Vaudeville Clairsentience

Welcome to New York City, where the Ghost of Tin Pan Alley still lurks.

This is an NYC tale about an EVIL force that threatens performers along the Mohican Road (The Bowery / Broadway). As the demon makes the author ill, she finds a balm- A SALVATION - in the performances of Fall 2023. One by The Mary Wallopers, one by a dance group doing a musical dance show called Arena. Both groups BATTLE the old cold thing.

The author illuminates histories of Black and Irish stereotypes in American Sheet Music.

8.5in x 11in, staple bound, printed on 80lb un-coated paper with a 100lb glossy cover.

Zine is full color baby, 44 pages

Excerpt:

"Do me justice, treat me fair
And I won’t be discontented
And I won’t be laughed at anywhere
But fairly represented

Andrew sings the refrain. It’s just so strange. I’ve been creeped out since I got off the subway. That cold and icy feeling crawls up my calves now. Irving Plaza is located right around the corner, literally a stone’s throw, from the former location of Tony Pastor’s Vaudeville Theater on 14th street. The cold climbs up my thighs and to my stomach. It envelopes me like a crooked hand. In the Tin Pan Alley songs, Paddy will do anything for whisky. Barney McShane will not speak to a suitor when she offers him tea, but liquor? Absolutely. It’s all comic until you’re wailing on your children and suffering liver failure. In Vaudeville skits, Irish males were often depicted as relatively harmless drunks and fighters. Vaudeville Irish females though, well, that’s a whole other story for another day. It was not pretty. Not at all.

The Minstrel Machine wound its fingers around the vaudeville stages of Union Square and scratched up Broadway’s back. Tin Pan Alley on 28th street published sheet music versions of Vaudeville’s famous songs. Tin Pan Alley then wrote songs for vaudeville stars to perform in places like Tony Pastor’s. The songs were on a feedback loop. Film began.

Early film reels played during continuous vaudeville shows, in place of actual, physical acts. These reels were simply the physical vaudeville acts made into film. They were about two minutes long. Many reels were filmed at a rooftop studio around the corner from Tony Pastor’s on Union Square. So Stage Irishness, this thing about which Andrew sings right now, this thing which he himself spars with as an Irishman on stage, especially in America, was cemented into song, into sheet, into celluloid, right here. 14th Street, Union Square, 133 years ago.

Now the cold thing is on my shoulders. It nuzzles my neck like a cat. My body sizzles and zaps with a ricocheting prickliness.

Dear wee little Francis, this is the one he called the train robber. This is the tarantula of music, crushing spirits with its dark and heaving limbs, making monsters of men, gripping pens and twisting tongues to make cash, milking people for their quirks and habits, slurping the gum water out of spittoons and pissing lemon juice over fields of green, just waiting in the wings to take its final snarling bite. It creeps up my skull, my eyes clamp against the tears, so many bodies around me blurry now, I am certain I will fall ill in the coming days. Grey milk and castor oil baron gatorade. I will stave off that thing which burnt down Japan Lithium Auto, I will repel the destructive force of this creature, which whooshing made its way across Arena’s facade, for I have shaken this man’s hand.

It happened at Bartley Dunnes. I approached Andrew at his laptop. I approached with the gingerness of journalists. I approached with calm confidence, moving into position, right on cue, and shook his hand.

“Hi. I’m Melanie and I’m here writing about Mary Wallopersism. Please, can you tell me, what is your goal?”

“To save Irish culture without becoming a false prophet.”

That was his only utterance. I could tell by the way he gripped my hand that something else manned his spirit. His body was lost under the influence of pints, but his words exacted crisping clarity.

For this is the way truth turns to language. This is the way the honest feeling forms in sound. First, it hears the call of the other, the one who presents the void. Then it parts the lips and pushes forth into waves of dependable substance."