Vaudeville Times Volume III

Frank Cullen and Donald McNeilly have partnered in many theatrical ventures over the decades, most notably in the 1982 founding of the American Vaudeville Museum, vaudeville.org, the research; writing, design and publishing of forty issues of Vaudeville Times (1998-2008); and their landmark, two-volume, sixteen-hundred page, Vaudeville, Old & New: An Encyclopedia of Variety Performers in America published by Routledge Press in 2007 to laudatory reviews. In 2006 they moved to the mountains of New Mexico with their equally elderly feline companion, Lulu (aka Velcro). They were joined in 2013 by Jake and Jessie who had somehow heard there was upholstery in those mountains. They are currently writing the fifth Porridge Sisters Adventure; a series of historical novels set in Boston from 1908 until 1932, by which time big-time vaudeville was dead but network radio shows were delivered into one’s parlor free of charge and motion pictures not only talked but sang and danced on screens across the world. Central to each book is Portridge Arms, ＂a boardinghouse for theatricals＂ on the now bulldozed Castle Street in the South End. Its proprietors are Florrie and Lavinia, whose strict vegetarian cookery prompted one vaudeville wag to re-christen them the Porridge Sisters. They continue the process of shipping AVM’s extensive collections of showbiz and vaudeville memorabilia, books and recordings to the University of Arizona where they become part of one of the largest collections in the country and available to students and researchers for the future. The Theatre Museum of New York honored their work in 2011 with the Excellence in Preservation of Theatre History Award.