why
break a leg?

VERSION 2 - 1988, Washington D.C.

I was 28 years old when I first crossed the historic wooden threshold of ‘Ford’s Theater’. Ford’s is that now sacred national monument where President Abraham Lincoln in 1864 was taken from life, following the American Civil War, by an assassin's bullet. The Ford’s basement below is now a museum dedicated to the life and successes of the late 16th President. The auditorium above is now a lovingly restored and fully functioning theater looking exactly the same way it did during Lincoln’s time. There are two plain white box seats holding four red tufted cushioned chairs each, flanking both sides of the stage like little private balconies. The boxes hover only 5 feet above the stage’s apron. The box on the right is where Lincoln was shot and is permanently draped in black bunting. A large black framed photo of Abraham Lincoln resides as a reminder on a display stand there.
         I was late for a TV rehearsal. I was scheduled to do my act for President and Mrs. Reagan to be recorded on the following night for a CBS TV special entitled: “An All Star Salute to Ford’s Theater”. The cameras were in place and the temporary studio lights were being hung and tested. On the bill with me were such notables as Ricardo Montalban and David Copperfield. Understandably, I was nervous.
         The director greeted me warmly. He had hand-picked a little known ventriloquist (me!) after seeing my New York performance in the Broadway musical called “Sugar Babies” where nightly I was a featured comedy act. Now I was scheduled to do that same act for the President and the First Lady as well as all of the leading politicians in Washington. It was a great honor for me that included a private dinner party at the Capitol Building as well as a cocktail reception with the President and Mrs. Reagan at the White House. Understandably, I was REALLY nervous.
         I distributed my music charts to the orchestra and the rehearsal went quickly. In fact it was fun. Afterwards, one of the sponsors for the show, an advertising representative for the Kraft Foods Company, came up to me and told me how at first they weren’t sure that a ventriloquist was going to be a good thing for their TV special but by watching my rehearsal they were all in agreement that I was actually going work out very well for the show. I was a stunned. ( I didn’t know that my rehearsal was also going to be an audition.) We talked some more ( I wanted to be reassured I was STILL going to be in the show ) and then the man tagged our conversation with
“-And by all means, this time DON’T break a leg”.

He chuckled at his own cleverness. I was puzzled. I asked how he knew that phrase. The advertising exec. replied that this theater was where that phrase originated. That didn’t make sense to me. Ford’s Theater? The place where John Wilkes Boothe shot Abraham Lincoln?
         The ad-exec. explained that after John Wilkes Boothe shot the President from behind, he lunged past the President and leapt over the rail of the box seats. He landed onto the stage below stopping the play in progress. His leg snapped, broken in the fall. In the chaos of performers running and audience members screaming, Boothe rose and hobbled to the upstage exit shouting “Sic temper tyrannis!”, which is Latin for “Thus goes [ends] a tyrant!”. He exited via a little-used stage door, and despite his broken leg, he mounted a waiting horse in the alley and escaped swiftly away into the night.
        How did Boothe know about the stage door leading to the alley? Because John Wilkes Boothe was a renowned actor. He knew Ford’s Theater, and its secrets, personally.
         I was told that following the assassination and the pursuit of Boothe (with his subsequent death in a barn fire) a huge public outrage was directed against all performers and actors of the theater. Actors were labeled as people of low morals who made a dishonest living doing ‘make-believe’. The American live entertainment industry of the late 1860’s actually ground to a halt and went into hiding for a spell. Morale was at such a low point for performers, that out of a sense of ironic humor any actor had only to shout “break a leg!” to the other entertainers to spur them on to a good performance.
         To me, It’s not so astonishing that actors and entertainers could joke like that in the face of adversity and bias. We make a living in finding, confronting, and exploiting the holes in society's fight to remain unfair and stupid. Besides, a look back in time reveals that a bloody Civil War had just ended and the American people, in general, were fatalistic in their expressions of what we now call gallows humor. Another now-famous but more morbid jest following the death of Lincoln was, “Well, other than that Mrs. Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?”



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