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Originally appeared in APeX Attack #4 (June 1999)
Apex Youth Ministries proudly presents… Christian Vaudeville
By Brad Farmer
In an occupation like ours, you often find yourself on a packed
airplane with nothing to do and nowhere to go for two or three
hours while in flight to your next destination. Conversation
often begins between strangers seated next to each other. Quite
often the conversations start with a common ground—travel,
the very flight you’re on. Common openers are: “So…
Are you from here or just visiting?” “Business or pleasure?”
When we reply business we get the standard, “Oh. What do
you do?” Or “What line of business are you in?”
That’s when the fun begins. “Oh… I’m a professional
juggler, comedian, and travelling preacher,” I spew quite
matter-of-factly. Coming from this wild-looking spiky-haired
kid sitting next to them, most people don’t quite know what
to make of that. Juggler, they could see me as. Comedian, quite
possibly. Itinerant preacher? How do these things mix together?
Their curiosity is piqued and they want to know more. It becomes
difficult to give people the quick answers that today’s
world often demands. It’s hard to accurately convey what
an Apex presentation is like in one phrase. When in need of a
quick description we often use words like “jugglers”,
“comedians”, “story-tellers”, and “travelling
preachers.” Somehow, people (including prospective booking
contacts) associate such a description of us with children’s
clowns. Must every juggler be a clown for children??!! Sometimes,
even after we explain our ministry more thoroughly, people still
only catch “juggler” and “storyteller”, and
immediately associate us with some childhood memory of some children’s
performer. I think it’s sad that more people don’t
experience this kind of live entertainment as adults. It’s
not just for kids. There was a time when this was a part of the
most popular form of entertainment in the country… (fade
out in wavy lines to flashback sequence)
There was a time in a budding land of opportunity, when cars
were starting to replace horse-drawn buggies and factories and
cities were sprouting up like pimples on the adolescent face
of America… a time of one of the greatest eras in American
entertainment history. At the turn of the last century, the Industrial
Revolution was still revolutionary and people from the countryside,
as well as thousands of immigrants, were flocking to the city.
Many of these folks were not used to the eight hour working day
that the factories provided, so when work was done and it wasn’t
yet time to hit the proverbial hay, there was a surplus of energy
in the community. “The average American workingman sought
entertainment and relaxation, and of a nature different from
that offered by saloons and beer halls, and now had the money
to pay for it.” (American Vaudeville As Seen by Its Contemporaries
edited by Charles W. Stein) A fellow would be wandering about
town (New York City), wondering how he could spend that new shiny
dime burning a hole in his pocket when he’d stumble across
old Tony Pastor’s new theater. Here they were offering a
fresh, new style of entertainment that put many smaller acts
together to make a full hour or two of good, solid, uncorrupted
entertainment. Shows would play two to six times each day (sort
of like today’s movie theaters), and they never had trouble
finding an audience. Just a few years later, there were many
theaters like Pastor’s up and down the east coast, even
in Chicago and several points west, all the way to the coast.
One of the owners of a chain of these theaters, a guy by the
name of Keith, started billing the shows as “vaudeville”.
(A word that comes from the French “Vaux-de-Vire” (translation:
the valleys of a city called Vire in the province of Normandy
in France) which referred to old performers and minstrels that
entertained French fairs and wrote funny cider drinking songs.)
Vaudeville was good, quality entertainment that was wholesome
and respectable. There was no “off-color” language
permitted and the shows were the kind of thing you could drag
the whole family to. In one show, there would usually be about
eight acts. Among these acts were usually a juggler, an acrobat
or two, a comic or some sketch comedy, a singer, a magician,
a pantomimist, a dancing couple, and maybe even an animal act.
“Offering as it did both variety and quality, vaudeville
soon became America’s most popular form of entertainment.
It remained so from the 1890s to the late 1920s and early 1930s
when its demise occurred at the hands of both talking pictures
and the unit-type stage show.” (American Vaudeville As
Seen by Its Contemporaries edited by Charles W. Stein) Nowadays,
folks just veg out in front the TV. Vaudeville was a meeting
place for the community, it brought America’s new ethnicities
together, and it required performers to be of a higher caliber.
There is a bit of a resurgence in this style of entertaining
today, in what’s called by some as “new vaudeville”.
It manifests itself in some off-Broadway productions and a few
theater troupes here and there.Sometimes an actor or comedian
has a particular style that can be referred to as “new-vaudeville”.
I have even heard of a few enlightened universities that host
“new vaudeville” festivals.
This all brings me to my glorious and enlightening point. Ladies
and gentlemen, boys and girls… the spirit of vaudeville
lives on in Apex! That’s right! Apex is what could be called
“Christian Vaudeville”. Take the variety presented
(including juggling,story-telling, personal testimony, sketch
comedy, and soon to be added musical silliness [concertina (a
little squeeze box thing) and musical saw playing] ) and the
style of the performers along with our never-ending mission to
spread Christ’s love and joy and throw it all into a big
pot, simmer for 90 minutes and what you end up with is Apex,
Christian Vaudeville! |