Theater
July, 1969
When Russell Parker's legs gave way and he found he couldn't even take a proper bow, he quit the vaudeville stage cold. It was the only heroic, or at least semiheroic, moment in his life. Then he settled down into a quit Harlem barbershop and let his martyrish wife kill herself supporting him. As Lonne Elder III's Ceremonies in Dark Old Men begins, Mrs. Parker has been dead for three years and daughter Adele has assumed the martyrdom. While Parker waits for customers who never come, taps out a m...
