"You musssssst come over."

[just a little jaunt down the rabbit hole and back]

Here’s your Gay Pride bicentennial minute for today, Sunday, June 2, 2024.

The lady on the left is female impersonator Bert Savoy, who is credited with coining “You don’t know the half of it, dearie”¹ and one of whose catchphrases was “You musssssst [sic,² I guess] come over,” quite possibly the inspiration for Mae West’s “Come up and see me sometime.” (The gentleman on the right is Bert’s performing partner, Jay Brennan.)³

Unlike Julian Eltinge, another famed female impersonator of the day,⁴ who cultivated a ladylike, elegant demeanor, Bert was more of a braying, shrieking queen. Edmund “Bunny” Wilson described Bert’s onstage persona as “a gigantic red-haired harlot, swaying her enormous hat, reeking with corrosive cocktails of the West Fifties. . . . One felt oneself in the presence of the vast vulgarity of New York incarnate and made heroic.”⁵

During his act, Bert liked to relate the exploits of his friend Margy, including the time a preacher, put out that Margy, apparently a church pianist (don’t ask me), was jazzing up the Sunday hymns, asked her if she’d ever heard of The Ten Commandments, to which Margy replied, “Don’t know it, but if you’ll hum a bit for me, I think I can pick out the tune.”⁶

According to legend, Bert’s last words, uttered in the midst of a Long Beach, L.I., thunderstorm on June 26, 1923, were “Mercy, ain’t Miss God cutting up something awful?” At which point Bert was struck by lightning (the bolt hit a bathhouse key—not that kind of bathhouse—that was hanging around his neck) and killed, along with his friend the vaudevillian Jack C. Grossman (aka Jack Vincent), whose hand was on Bert’s shoulder at the time.

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And here’s your copyediting tutorial for the day:

Improbable amounts should be expressed in, as with emojis, odd numbers, and preferably without repetition of digits. “I’ve watched this movie 873 times” means “I’ve watched this movie a lot.” “I’ve watched this movie 442 times” means “I've watched the movie 442 times.”

❤️❤️❤️ is sweet.

❤️❤️❤️❤️ is you’re Patrick Bateman.

And be sure never to create a four-digit random number beginning 57, because people will think you’re talking about whatever Jewish year it happens to be.

You don’t get this kind of helpful stuff from Strunk and White, do you now.

1. Immortalized by the Gershwins here:

2. As we’ve discussed ad nauseam, once a non-English word or phrase is domesticated into English, we drop the italics (the aslant type) and default to roman (the straight up and down type), and that covers everything from sushi to kibbutz to, as just above, ad nauseam. And yet [sic], always in brackets because you’re always setting it in quoted material, holds on to its italics. Why? I don’t know. But in the immortal words of Tevye the dairyman, it’s a tradition.

3. At the height of their career, Savoy and Brennan were reportedly raking in $1,500 a week, which is about $27,000 in our debased version of money.

4. The AMC multiplex on 42nd Street in Manhattan is housed in what’s left of the Eltinge Theatre, the only Broadway house I know of that’s named after a drag queen. (No, you shut up.) Funnily enough, Eltinge never played in his namesake theater, which was built and operated by producer A. H. Woods, La Eltinge’s partner in a lucrative seven-year contract.

5. If Bert’s female alter ego had a name, I can’t find it.

6. Apropos of queer jokes and drag acts, Douglas Carter Beane’s 2013 play The Nance included one of my favorites gags, a wonderful bit that had certainly been knocking around for aeons—it made an appearance in the 1979 Mickey Rooney–Ann Miller revue Sugar Babies, none of whose jokes were a day under sixty—but it was a special treat to hear the great Nathan Lane deliver it: “I overheard Fred say to Ned, ‘Is that Hortense?’ And Ned replied, ‘She looks pretty relaxed to me.’” I’ve been trying to google my way back to the ur-version, but you’d be amazed how many times the phrase “is that Hortense” shows up in books and other publications.