Rubes

Plays and poems

Frozen Dog by William C. Hunter, A Mothers' Meeting by Arlo Bates, and Rubetown Minstrels by Frederick G. Johnson

Frozen Dog, Idaho, existed only in the imagination of Colonel William C. Hunter. It was a place in his home state where man was good to fellow man. Women were respected and protected. The Golden Rule was ever followed. People minded their business and did not judge; they extended a hand to the guy in need. And they spent their working days in wholesome pursuits; and their leisure time hunting and tramping about the place and fishing. Breathing in deep all that ozone.

This little book is a collection of illustrated poems. I imagine the deeper and more thoroughgoing examination of Frozen Dog and what it represents can be found in other books by Colonel Hunter, books that are only alluded to here and which I, to my discredit, have not read. But I think I have the gist of it. The inhabitants of Frozen Dog are simple people. They ask for tolerance from their fellows and do not pry.

What anyone has done before they came here matters not at all, the colonel says. We know how to treat miscreants in Frozen Dog. If they’re bad, they get run out of town; and if they’re very bad, they’re swiftly lynched. As Colonel Hunter says, it’s an efficient system, if such a system could be presumed to take root and work in reality.

The poems themselves are very, almost aggressively, simple. Two old men think about their friendship. Another old man smokes and considers his life and his place here, in so small and distant a community. A man who makes some money in speculation, or an investment, or in sincere commerce, thinks about his youth a-hunting and a-fishing and considers that he was likely happier then. Someone leaves Frozen Dog and knows there are tears in the eyes of their stout-hearted fellows.

It might be a seductive vision. Many people want to live away from others except the people of their own choosing — to be beyond the cares of the modern world and all it insists upon as it moves us faster, faster.

This is of course sentimental, and some might call it doggerel. The poems more or less scan and they’re not offensive in their blandness, their deliberate rustic charm. It just becomes a little too much when considered in retrospect. Hunter’s imagination is not total, and it can seem small. To think, for example, that just because life is deeply satisfying it must also be moral — the idea doesn’t always convince. But it is pleasant enough to stop over for a little time in Frozen Dog, Idaho. If only for a brief while.

Rubetown Minstrels is almost exactly as it sounds: some rubes — we are told not, if we are acting the play, to overdo the hick accents — need some money to fix the church roof. What do they decide to do to raise it? To put on a minstrel show, of course! As everyone would do in their situation. The play itself is just a frame, with some truly hokey jokes (we honestly and truly get the one about the dog with no nose here) in between songs and what were once called specialities. It’s more the framework for a vaudeville, variety-type show than its finished reality. And strangely enough, in the final play at least, the minstrelsy almost does not feature — although I suppose if the songs it was meant to include were all like “My Mammy” as played by Al Jolson, that may have been different.

There’s simplicity in works like this, but that simplicity must be very charming to win over a modern reader. I’m just interested enough in the mechanics of old shows like this to care, but I imagine very few will share that interest.

Our final comedy is set, I imagine, in a small town. A town near enough to Boston for stern matriarchs to travel into the city on occasion, but far enough outside it for the town or village to have a distinct character, a small but rigorously policed internal pecking order. A number of fat cats and starving dogs of its very own.

The circumstance of this place is a mothers’ meeting, to discuss — well, that is a little difficult to decide. It ought to be about the great debate, the permanent debate: the education of children, the giving of moral character to the young. But it is ever being interrupted. Perhaps the speaker has forgotten the paper she intended to bring, and has instead incorrectly taken along another. Perhaps one or two of the other speakers have ideas of making fun.

The woman who cares most decidedly for discipline has a son at Harvard who is eager to squire a chorus girl. Another woman here is not even a mother, she’s a ‘Miss’ of very ancient and redoubtable spinsterhood. While one more member of this little party only wants to tell everyone of her husband’s little jokes, to speculate about what he might think when he is told what they had all been discussing.

Naturally the meeting ends in chaos, as meetings do. I can’t attest to mothers’ meetings, of course — just every other kind of meeting. And being derailed by jokers and unexpected news is something every other congregation falls victim to — at least at one time or another.