Great Gobbet

Twenty U. S. women practiced in London last week the curtsies they proposed to make this week to King George and Queen Mary. Along with the other 19, Mrs. Charles Gates Dawes, wife of the Ambassador, would present in an atmosphere breathless with awe her own Virginia. Meanwhile Their Majesties savored with relish an emotion no less potent than awe.

They go seldom to the opera, seldom to serious plays, occasionally to farce, repeatedly to a musical comedy. They saw

Rose Marie four times (TIME, Nov. 18, 1929). Before the Royal Courts last week came the night of Their Majesties annual "command performance" at a music hall. Occasion: charity. (His Majesty's liege subject Charles Spencer Chaplin had refused to perform [TIME, May 18], sent a charitable contribution of $1,000 which he contemptuously called "about as much as I earned in my last two years on the English stage.") Place: the Palladium Music Hall, jammed as usual with men and women who like belly-laughs, smoke and beer. Because this was George V's first public appearance since bronchitis last put him to bed (TIME, April 20), the Palladium had wished to take steps; but George V ordered that "no smoking" be not ordered. The air was faintly blue when the King entered in opera cloak and dress clothes, the Queen in a long, fur-trimmed cloak of gold lame, her silver hair surmounted by a diamond and emerald bandeau. "'Ooraw for 'is Majesty!" roared an oystermonger or perhaps a fishwife, and the cheer was on. Smokers then spontaneously knocked out their pipes, trod on their gaspers (cheap cigarets). "Pipe Lady May," whispered some to others. In the box with Their Majesties sat Lady May Cambridge (mentioned as George V's candidate for the hand of Edward of Wales) with her mother Princess Alice of Albany and her father the Earl of Athlone, brother of Queen Mary and just retired from his Governor Generalship of the Union of South Africa.

On the bill were two U. S. acts, many British. Juggler Rich Hayes (British) drew royal smiles. Blackfaces Alexander & Mose (British) caused Lady May Cambridge to titter. Xylophonist Teddie Brown (U. S.) realized his ambition of some years to play at a "command performance" and thus swell his British gate. But with a gobbet of chewing gum, Broadway's robustious Al Trahan stopped the show, rocked the Palladium with mighty mirth and convulsed the Royal Party.

Mr. Trahan's act (he was lately in The Second Little Show) consists in messing with a huge wad of chewing gum while he plays the piano and is mauled by Miss Eukona Cameron when she is not singing. Last week Miss Cameron did not tear off quite so many of Mr. Trahan's outer clothes as usual. But the chewing gum oozed and blobbered from Mr. Trahan's lips, was stuck under the piano, retrieved, chewed, stuck again, smeared on the piano keys, frantically stretched in all directions, finally gathered together for the supreme effort of mirth. This comes when the lump appears beneath Mr. Trahan's posterior and he hastily sits down on it, thus sticking himself to the piano stool where he antics gummily in mad dismay.

The King-Emperor said afterward: "That man, Al Trahan, the American comedian, made me laugh very much."

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