This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed human. Who wants to go to the minstrel show? It's one more thing. I'm strong and getty. One more thing. Before we get to that, I was doing a little research on bimbification as the story just broke a little bit ago about Kristi Noem's husband, who is into the scene, the bimbification scene, apparently as all the pictures have come out of him in a tight little top with big, big, giant, fake breasts and tiny little shorts. Reminds me of that weirdo teacher in Canada. Yes. Although didn't he turn out to be making a statement? I don't know. Against political correctness? I don't know. Yeah. It usually includes large augmented breasts, heavy makeup, blonde hair, form fitting or revealing clothing and an affect of a ditzy carefree sexually available femininity. Hmm. And then so the question I was asking just the way he was dressed, is is he a gay dude? I'm not that that matters. Well, it matters to his wife probably. They're in a heterosexual marriage. Um, but according to chat, GBT anyway, the community, the bimbification community is mostly women and LGBTQ dudes. I'm sure there are some straight dudes, but it's mostly not. So who knows? I don't know many straight men that put on lipstick and little pink tight shorts and, but he's super into like bimbo-fied women because he wants to be one. I don't know. Oh, wow. Anyway, sounds like a long therapy session. I have a feeling Oprah is going to come out of retirement and do an interview with him. He will cry. He'll go through an entire box of tissues and explain how he's been hiding this his whole life. Or Diane Sawyer, she did the one with Bruce Jenner when he came out as Caitlyn Jenner. Yeah. So we'll have a good cry, deflate his balloon boobs and restuff. He'll want to use tissues pink shorts and just like a man. Damn it. Like a man. Cory Lewandowski will throw his head back and laughter. Back to the minstrel show thing. Oh, and one other quick follow up to yesterday's one more thing podcast, which I'm going to assume if you're listening to this one, you probably listened to yesterday's, which Joe brought us that author. What was the guy's name? Inman. Oh, yeah. The Inman Diaries. Man, I did quite a deep dive on that throughout the day yesterday. Fascinating stuff. There's tons and tons of effective audio recorded almost all of it. So there's audio recordings going over many, many, many decades. Him and his entire family every single day forever. Yeah. He was absolutely a nut and cruel and selfish and and morally indefensible, but he collected an oral history of the century unlike anything ever heard. It's one of the most thorough diaries of an everyman in the history of the world. And then he puts a bullet in his head at age 63. And that's the end of that. Yeah, I actually ordered a 500 plus page edition of that. I mean, it's it runs what wouldn't I say 25 times as long as the Bible in its entirety, who has the time? You nobody got time for that. Anyway, minstrel shows fits into and I mentioned this. I can't remember what the other one was, but it's USA 250, which is a year long Wall Street Journal series examining America's first 250 years and they look at different aspects of American life for each of their their articles. And this one is looking at entertainment in America from singing Yankee Doodle to streaming Avengers. That's been entertainment. And then they start with the early republic. It's all about music and fairs because mass entertainment didn't exist. The bigger cities like New York and Philadelphia boasted theaters. But for most American families across 13 newly independent states, public entertainment options generally were limited to dances, feasts. I tell you what, honey, you go to the dance, I'll go to the feast. Yes, that's not a tough call. And local traveling fairs. This professor of history says you have large scale gatherings of people for harvest days and feast days in the South. Court days also provide an entertainment. Those were the days when the court was in session in a county. So all the lawyers and judges would come together. Anybody you had a case that they needed to hear or whatever would all come together and everybody would come together for events like horse racing and wrestling on court days on a typical day in American family would be more likely to entertain itself at home by singing traditional folk songs like Barbara Allen, patriotic songs such as Yankee Doodle or hymns like Amazing Grace. Local families would visit each other to talk, make music and play simple games like cards or checkers. I can imagine gathering my two sons on a Saturday night. We're going to sing folk songs and out the lyrics. Not Barbara Allen again, dad. Hey, come on now. It's a great song. Meanwhile, back on the plantation, black Americans enslaved were using homemade instruments such as stringed gourds to produce music with complex rhythms influenced by the African traditions, which would later develop into blues and jazz. And they like to tell traditional stories like Brer Rabbit and anancy tricksters who provided models for overcoming powerful oppressors. See where that would resonate. And by the time we moved into the early 19th century, American families in cities enjoyed a new entertainment option, public gardens. Places of sanctuary built into cities where you could walk around in a more pastoral setting. Most of the gardens have stages where shows are put on and people start bringing their kids. So this is actually just, you know, parks, pretty spaces in the midst of the urban grittiness of the 19th century, which was some damn gritty grittiness. Entertainment entrepreneurs like P.T. Barnum eventually expanded these gardens to include music museums and theaters where families could do everything from gawking at unusual people. That's one way to put it. Yeah. Or animals to watching performances of fairy tale characters like Aladdin or Goldilocks. Let's go laugh at people with birth defects. Oh, in the 1840s, some gardens and theaters began to put on minstrel shows in a typical performance family might watch a spoof of a Shakespeare play performed in blackface with heavy elements of pantomime, as well as the minstrel lineup in which the performance would get up one by one to sing or tell jokes while the quote unquote end men at each end of the line cracked side jokes about the performances. Oh, I love that. They'd handle the performances. Yeah. Some of the most popular minstrel songs of the year are still sung today like Camp Town Races and Oh, Susanna. Says this history professor. The minstrel show was clearly designed to demean African Americans, but it was also a major form of family entertainment. They're doing these things to appeal to kids. Then, interestingly, parlor pianos became more affordable in the mid 1800s. And a lot of people bought pianos and the 1860s saw the emergency emergence of board games such as the checkered game of life, which we talked about the last time we talked about this, which taught and became the game of life, which taught children moral lessons by rewarding virtues like honesty, industry and ambition while pushing vices like gambling and temperance or idolists. Remember the key to that was some of the squares included humiliation, despair and suicide. Yikes. Well, you got nothing else to do. Yeah. Then you got the Gilded Age or 1880s and 90s. Circus has got bigger and bigger companies like Ringling Brothers, Barnum and Bailey offered elephants, equestrian acts, clowns and contortionists in a huge big top that could seat thousands. So that dates back to the 1880s. A contortionist. Oh, I do enjoy good contortionists. In many places, the circus was the biggest business anyone had ever seen. They're very organized and modern. People were excited by seeing something so new. I'm sure. And then you'd have your traveling extravaganza's like Buffalo Bill's, Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West shows. We've seen those reenacted in the movies, which I guess were just spectacular. They would have hundreds of performers reenacting frontier battles. Well, and then try to imagine that when you haven't seen anything, the slightest bit entertaining in like five years. Well, now wait a minute. I was playing the humiliation and suicide game at home with my friends and singing Barbara Allen. I mean, you haven't done anything the least bit out of work and school and raising kids every day, day after day, week after week, month after month, season after season for so long. Yeah, anything comes along to town. It's going to seem pretty exciting. Well, yeah, but how about hundreds of performers like reenacting the battle? A little big horn. Be awesome. Shooting blanks at each other and stuff like that. Oh, my God, you lose your mind. Philadelphia's Centennial Exhibition of 1876 was the first major World's Fair to be held in the U.S. It drew nearly 10 million visitors, 20 percent of the population of the country. Wow. Geez. In 1876. Yeah. And that was right around when vaudeville began to take off by the 1890s. Millions of Americans would go out to vaudeville shows every week. Typical vaudeville show involved a series of 10 minute acts like stand up comedy, dancing, singing and juggling. Vaudeville troops would travel the country by rail, performing at sites from small town opera houses to urban theater, seating several thousand people. Ground floor tickets were about a buck, but you got to adjust for inflation. Of course. In the home, a rich family might have one of the new phonographs that played music stored on wax cylinders. But most families were still making their own music using sheet music or song books. Hmm. They were reading serialized fiction newspapers, magazines. That was Charles Dickens, how he came to fame, writing serialized books. Kind of think it up as he went. And then the early 20th century, Golden Age, Hollywood, early silent movies, etc. First projected on screen at vaudeville shows during intermissions. But after a while, people were like, that's more entertaining than the show. Right. Right. And then in the late 20s, sound came to movies and movie attendance grew by 40 percent. Almost immediately they were amazed. They could see the top stars singing and dancing. They could hear the rattatad of the guns and also made for a tremendous amount of creativity and movie making. It's interesting. Uh, airborne warfare came along earlier than talky movies. I mean, maybe that's obvious in a way because of the technology, but I don't know. Seems odd to me. And then, you know, we're much more familiar with the 20th century and how that's changed. And there's no reason to go through that. I looked up the lyrics. Hit me in Scarlet town where I was born. There was a fair made dwelling made every youth cry well a day. Her name was Barbara Allen. It was in the merry month of May when green buds were swelling. Sweet William on his deathbed lay for the love of Barbara Allen. And it goes on like that. Well, yep, I can just see me in the song about a hottie. You see me and the kids sit around singing that. I try that this Saturday night, put away your turn off the TV, put away your video games. We're going to sing Barbara Allen. Got a song for you. Yeah. The leaves were the buds were a swelling kids. Come on. No, some respect. People in the past were so dumb. Sure. Sure they were. Wow. Well, I guess that's it. Yeah.
