The Strange Case of the High School Plays

       The high school in a northern suburb of Brisbane which I attended in the 1960s used to put on amateur dramatics twice a year. The first was always an operetta, usually be Gilbert and Sullivan, whose copyrights had run out. The second was a collection of short skits and one act plays which we usually wrote ourselves, with the result that they featured broad, very corny humour. However, one of the teachers dug up an old farce by George Bernard Shaw entitled, Passion, Poison, and Petrifaction. Little did we know that over in America, throughout the 1930s right up to the 1960s, there existed a whole genre of plays specifically written for high school performances, and that the pupils regularly chronicled them, along with still photographs, in their yearbooks.

The Trousers Circuit in Old Mexico

      What did the average Mexican male - at least the Indians or mixed bloods - wear as a lower garment in the early days of the last century? The photos in the October 1919 issue of the National Geographic article on that nation did not appear to me to be very illustrative of the matter. However, page 322 featured a picture entitled, "The Market at Guanajuato: Mexico" which did not appear unusual to me, at least as far as men's fashion was concerned. However, the text below it went as follows:

Note that the men wear trousers instead of the typical pajama-like costume of the Mexican. Formerly a recognized method of getting labor for public works in Mexican towns was to arrest road-builders, carpenters, masons, or whatever class of worker was needed, on some flimsy charge, and sentence them to "hard labor" for a requisite period on municipal projects. Some years ago Guanajuato introduced a variation in this practice and replenished its treasury by fining all natives coming into town in the usual garments. There was also a suspicion that some enterprising trousers-maker had influenced the city government. After their first surprise, the crafty country folk evaded the fine, and also avoided a run on the trousers market by buying one pair per community and arranging schedules by which the busy trousers became ambulant jitneys, making three or four trips a day with different passengers.