#227: Who's On First?

Maybe I’m amazed, but I never knew that Abbott & Costello ever toured here, but then I’m sure that loads of people have toured this country that I never knew about, so don’t use me as any form of a touring barometer. Hell, I only found out the other week that Marlene Dietrich popped down to Adelaide in the early 1970s, but that’s why I have an almost unhealthy interest in buying tour programmes and other paper goods. One day I’ll send a few sherpas into my carport and sort out all of the clippings, programmes and other piles and boxes of shit. Hopefully I’ll do it before I cark it, that way I can make some extra cash.

Back to Abbott & Costello. Before the comedy team of Tony and Peter came along in the 1990s, these two were the only ones that answered to that name. Fat and Skinny, as we used to call them at primary school, mainly because nobody could correctly differentiate between Bud & Lou and Stan & Oliver, used to crack me up no end. I still love their horror spoofs to the point where I’m sure that others who loved the Universal Horrors, which I do, look upon me with scorn.

Scorn away. If it makes me laugh then it can’t be that bad. I know next to nothing about this tour so there’s not a lot of light I can shed. I know that the Abbott & Costello fan club devoted one of their quarterlies to the tour, so I might have to try and find that one.  I do know that as the text mentions the first Sinatra tour, which was January 1955, and that this was the second of three shows that lost a shed load of money for Lee Gordon (and, one presumes, his silent partner, Abe Saffron) then this would tour would have taken place between Betty Hutton (great idea that) and Bob Hope. With all that in place then this could be dated to around May 1955.

Did anyone see them? Either way…slowly I turned, step by step…

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