Julius Caesar Dressing Room Essay

It is late evening, November 16th, 1932. The Depression is at its greatest; New York City's Palace Theatre has become a cinema, ringing the death knell for vaudeville – that roaring heartbeat of the 1920s.

Welcome to a place where nothing sounds but the clinks and tinkles of memories: secretive, undiscovered, where one’s nose is warmed by that earthiness found only by the Mississippi. A dead oak, left scarred and blackened by lightning long ago, haunts the scene; a frayed rope dangles from its thickest branch. Around its roots lies strewn a colorful collection of liquor bottles. Under the canopy is a light-studded dressing-room mirror. Distant and muffled, there echoes applause and laughter, clacking feet and happy ballads.

Climbing up and down a ladder, ornamenting the oak with all this glassware, is a clown – a Pierrot, dressed in angelic, flowing white. It is Blueberry, the stage persona of Isaac Solomon Loew, a Mississippian Jew performing on vaudevillian Broadway. Wrestling with guilts of times bygone, he frequently flees from his pain not only into performance, but also into sex. His increasingly addictive escapes have finally lost him his wife, right as he loses his employment. Isaac enters his dressing-room for the last time; and as he sheds his painted

Blueberry is a trumpeter of life, whose dreams fly above storms and tears; and Isaac's twisting, turning, heartfelt, and honest journey through both his errors and the United States’ first three decades into the twentieth century — through saloons, towns, cities, brothels, circuses, churches, theaters, and more — presents a poetic, enchanting perspective on the nature of encounters and escapes; on how people detach and isolate themselves from pain and painful truths; and on gladness, sadness, and everything in