Ladies' Day

Some of the hardest-working performers in show business are to be found neither in Hollywood nor on TV screens but on the creamed-chicken circuit. The nation's 22,000 women's clubs spend about $10 million a year in fees for top-name lecturers, traveloguers and other platform Poloniuses. After the cream of the chicken is ladled out, along come the hundreds of lesser performers who cannot get bookings through the major agencies. For them, job opportunities are offered on Thursday mornings in an ancient littb hall at Chicago's Art Institute. There the presidents and program chairmen of some 500 Midwestern women's clubs, as critical as any group of Broadway angels, gather to audition acts.

Into the hall one typical Thursday walked nine hopefuls with eight minutes apiece to do their stuff. Three lights concealed onstage gave them their signals: green (speak louder), yellow (one more minute), red (stop). By way of a warmup, Chicago's Mrs. Charles S. Clark, who started the audition system 41 years ago. promised a program of "artists in embryo," recited a little poem entitled, Because I Got Up So Early Today:

Something happy will happen today, Something to cherish at close of day, Some tenderness in unexpected faces, Some atomic thing to feather my spirit's wing.

Inner Space & Pluck. Thus primed, the talent scouts welcomed buxom Contralto Francesca Friedlander, a Czechoslovakian refugee in a Moravian peasant costume, who explained that "on this beautiful morning I am going to bring you our rivers. I wish you to hear our country, that you should smell our woods, feel our Slavic heart." She belted out a couple of rousing folk songs, wound up with a teary Tenderly that touched every expatriate-loving heart (fee: $50-$80). Pretty Roslyn Rensch, harpist ("a program of rare charm and beauty for discriminating audiences"), strummed out Believe Me if All Those Endearing Young Charms and Around the World in 80 Days. She was fine until she ran into some trouble on about the 76th day, but her pluck won nice applause (fee: $35-$75).

Doughnuts & Nibbles. And so it went: a baritone-soprano duo, a dramatic monologue by a man who told the stirring story of a 41-year-old doughnut, a book reviewer, a man showing a travel film on Texas. Biggest hit: an obviously talented 17-year-old Korean pianist named Tong II Han, whose fluid performance of Scarlatti and Chopin sent the audience into a dither (fee: $150-$250).

Out in the lobby later, the performers waited expectantly like freshmen on fraternity row as club presidents rushed out to sign some, ignored others. Tong II Han won a good half a dozen bookings right off. Singer Friedlander got a few nibbles ("They took all my brochures; I am told that this is a good sign"), and by last week Harpist Rensch had found a few bookings in the mail. For newcomers, Mrs. Clark's auditions may be the first real break (young Edgar Bergen did monologues for women's clubs before he got his first dummy), and for oldtimers, they may be the last one. In 1929 Mrs. Clark took in penniless Poet Edwin (The Man with the Hoe) Markham, got him going on the circuit, reciting poetry. Though Markham, then 80, could never remember where he put the ladies' checks, Mrs.Clark recalls proudly that creamed chicken kept him going until he died.

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