by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Turner Classic Movies was
showing a truly weird Vitaphone short from 1934 (it bore Production Code
certificate #68) called simply Vaudeville, that purported to depict a vaudeville bill featuring a dog act called
Carl Emmy and His Mad Wags; a dance group called the Three Queens (an ironic
title today because it was actually three women dressed as men — white shirts,
black pants, black neckties and short, slicked-down hair — doing an act that
today would be referred to as “drag king”!); Jack Pepper and His Society Pets
(a singer whose act was disrupted by a comedy band, sort of like the act Spike
Jones did a decade later); and the headliners, little-person dance couple
George and Olive Brasno and normal-sized Buster Shaver, who was their piano
accompanist for part of the act and took George’s place as Olive’s dance
partner for part of it. The Three Queens were by far the best part of this
short — it helped that one of the songs they danced to was Duke Ellington’s
“It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing),” a surprising choice for a
1934 movie (but then since Ellington’s “Sophisticated Lady” was in another 1934
Warners musical short, it’s possible Irving Mills, who then managed Ellington
and published his music, had an “in” with someone at Warners to place
Ellington’s songs in these films), though the shots of Buster Shaver twirling
diminutive Olive Brasno around himself and playing with her like a kid with a
Barbie doll were pretty weird!
