Progress Party

Lily Pons drank from a nursing bottle, Rosa Ponselle rode a bicycle, big Lauritz Melchior, forgetting he was the world's greatest Wagnerian tenor, dressed up like Salome with painted toenails. Because the Metropolitan Opera Company is again desperately hard up it was giving its third Opera Surprise Party. New Yorkers paid $14,000 and laughed three hours to see the expensive singers without wigs or dignity.

"Time stumbles on." shouted Raymond Knight, a National Broadcasting Company announcer who mastered the ceremonies from a grandtier box. He had written a comical libretto called "A Half Century of Progress." Lily Pons was the Metropolitan in infancy. Ponselle's bicycle act was for the gay '90's. An important debut was remembered for 1906 and white-haired Geraldine Farrar bowed from the audience. Then Tenor Melchior appeared as the 1907 Salome, did the Dance of the Seven Veils to show why the Metropolitan's directors objected.

In 1932 Pons, Ponselle and Lawrence Tibbett struggled to get radio auditions but no one in the broadcasting studios had heard of them. The 1934 finale was a jazzed version of Aida with a Ford used instead of horses and all the members of the company kowtowing to Cartoonist Otto Soglow who sat on the throne dressed like his own "Little King." But as the audience jostled out into the night the talk was not so much of the comedy as of the evening's one serious interlude. When Narrator Knight reached the year 1921 the stage was empty save for the big bass drum and the clown's cap which Enrico Caruso used in Pagliacci. While the audience was reverently still a Caruso phonograph record was played.

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