When drinking booze, please
assign a designated dancer

Novelist John Cheever once said he could always detect even a drop of sherry in anyone’s prose. An exaggeration, no doubt, but in principle the statement rings true. One should never mix alcohol with one’s work, generally speaking. I learned this lesson several times during the past 40-odd years, though never more dramatically than on the night, during a performance of Where’s Charley?, I came on stage fried to the tonsils and fell flat on my ass — twice — while turning cartwheels in a first act production number.

It wasn’t until the show’s finale that I fully sobered up. Why I wasn’t fired I’ll never understand. I wasn’t even reprimanded by the stage manager, who stood in the wings at the moment of catastrophe. Perhaps he was drunk too. Or goosing a chorine making a late entrance.

It happened like this. In the interval between a matinee and evening performance that Wednesday, the two lads I shared a dressing room with joined me at the Dixie Hotel Cocktail Lounge for an aperitif. The latter tasted so good we ordered a second. And then a third.

To make a long, wet story short and dry, the three of us skipped dinner and reported back to the theater feeling mighty good. If we all sang “How Dry I Am” in close harmony while applying our make-up, I shouldn’t be at all surprised, but I don’t remember.

I do remember my left arm buckling under me as I turned Cartwheel No. 1 center stage with all lights full up. In my right hand I held a baton because I was leading a marching band, in full-dress uniform. I gathered myself off of the floor, went for Cartwheel No. 2, and experienced the like result.

I got myself aloft all right, but the arm just wouldn’t support me. There I lay, with everybody else dancing around me. Not wishing to make a habit of these pratfalls, I decided not to go for Cartwheel No. 3, joining the rest of the chorus as best I could and finishing the damned number like a disenfranchised ghost in purgatory.

The episode continues to appear at regular intervals in the form of a nightmare, from which I awaken (not screaming) but bathed in sweat. In light of all this, I’ve nothing but admiration for the late Richard Burton, who, according to his own account, consumed a fifth of vodka during a performance of Camelot on Broadway. Claimed it was the only way he could get through it.

By the same token, John Barrymore wasn’t above tippling during live performances of Hamlet, and once — so the legend goes — stepped into the wings briefly to vomit before returning to the limelight to conclude a soliloquy. However, neither of those gentlemen had to turn cartwheels with one arm.

I neglected to mention that the aperitifs consumed on that fatal evening in 1949 were double Manhattans, served straight up in the type of five-ounce glass that resembles a miniature birdbath. (Didn’t want you to think that three copies of just any old drink could put me down for the count of 10.)