The one-legged dancing bull fighter who had a golden tassel affixed to his stump

Double-legged former dancer Anna Smith in her hospital bed

The So It Goes blog’s occasional Canadian comedy correspondent Anna Smith has just been released from St Paul’s Hospital in Vancouver after being admitted to their emergency department on Valentine’s Day to get a Dacron patch sewn onto her aorta… She tells me she wants “to warn healthy young people about the dangers of enduring  years in murky subterranean caves that pass as limelight”.

When in London, before her move to the Dominion of Canada, she helped Sir Gideon Vein run the now ironically-named Open Heart Cabaret. She used to dance at the Nell Gwynne club in Soho during the day, the Gargoyle Club at night and then spend her time at the old Comedy Store until the early hours.

If she had died under the surgeons’ knives in Canada, she had wanted her obituary to include the fact she had performed with Julian Clary and the much lamented late David Rappaport and that she had been forced to learn to play the accordion as a child and appeared on Canadian television with Andre the Giant.

“Now,” she tells me, “I’ve been given a heart-shaped pillow as a physiotherapy tool and it says Open Heart on it….Veins, hearts, sternums being sawn in half and wired together.”

She also tells me she was given “orientation at the hospital for the cardiac rehab program… The walls were adorned with vapid monotone posters dedicated to mind-boggling philosophical questions like WHAT IS AN AVOCADO (printed on green paper) and NUTS – WHATS IN ‘EM ? (printed on brown paper). Now that dietitians and physiotherapists can produce their own amateur pamphlets with the push of a print button, there is no longer any need for the Department of Health to waste public money on artists or copywriters. I sat though a dull PowerPoint presentation about Cardiac Health, which I made bearable by mentally substituting the word Catholic for Cardiac: WHY CATHOLIC PATIENTS NEED FIBRE… HOW CATHOLIC PATIENTS RELIEVE STRESS…”

Anna tells me that recent local Vancouver news includes the story that “Immigration Officials abetted by a local television station and the National Geographic TV channel raided a downtown building site where they chased, captured and filmed migrant construction workers from Mexico and Honduras. The workers were made to sign legal papers which they did not comprehend and which turned out to be releases so that their images can appear on a reality TV show called Border Services to be screened on the National Geographic channel.”

Anna also tells me that her sojourn in hospital has made her realise there is “hope for mutilated dancers” but it also seems to have allowed her to develop a possibly unhealthy obsession about Signor Donato, an obscure one-legged dancer who was an enormous success touring Australia in the 1870s.

She reports:

“It appears there was more than one Signor Donato. The original was a hit in Covent Garden in London in the 1850s and danced dressed as a bullfighter with a golden tassel affixed to his stump which, it was said, resembled a cushion on an old fashioned sofa, his mutilated state notwithstanding.

Lola Montez – pursued by a one-legged man?

“The second Signor Donato was an imitator of the original, who toured Australia and New Zealand several times before heading to California… possibly following the trail of Lola Montez, the Sligo-born ‘Spanish Dancer’, toppler of governments, and creator of the infamous erotic Spider Dance who ended her days performing charitable work for the fallen women of Brooklyn.”

Anna continues:

“One of the Signor Donatos (the first, I think) was said to be an immense favourite in London, Paris and Milan. He was said to have lost his leg fighting under Garibaldi when a shell burst during the Battle of Magenta in 1859. He surprised his audience with the grace and agility he displayed and danced to an introductory adagio, followed by the Jeanette Polka (accompanying himself with castanets) and concluded with the Garibaldi March.

“I first heard of him in a book I read in the 1980s: Enter the Colonies, Dancing, an Australian history of their early touring dancers. Then I read an article titled Strange Players by Dutton Cook (Belgravia). Strange Players was written in 1881 and is a documentation of famous maimed and mutilated dancers and actors working in London at that time.

“This small advert appeared in the Wellington Independent, 16 August, 1872 :

SIGNOR DONATO
Who created the great furore
at Covent Garden in 1864
will appear at the
ODD FELLOWS HALL
for
ONE NIGHT ONLY
On his way to San Francisco

“I have no idea what the great furore was…..and can’t find out if he ever arrived in San Francisco.”

The preface to a 1895 German book (Fahrend Volk by Signer Saltarino, Leipzig) says:

“The one-legged dancer first came into style with Julio Donato, a Spanish bull fighter, who lost a leg in a bull fight. Through industry and practice, he was able to perform the most graceful, surprising and agreeable dances. His appearance, manner and personality were far from painful. He married the daughter of the Viennese actor Julius, herself a popular actress, who bore him a lovely daughter, Dora Donato, who became a very well known light opera singer. After Donato’s death, a number of artificial (kuenstlich) and genuine monopedic dancers and clowns sprang up, all of whom were only weak imitations of their prototype. Only the one-legged clowns who called themselves The Donatos after their famous original appeared not only to inherit the artistic ability of their predecessor but his luck.”

Anna tells me:

“The imposter Signors Donato were particularly prevalent after the Great War and some even teamed up together. One particular duo called themselves The Merry Monopedes.

Anna is recovering well from her operation but worried that she may become “the world expert on monopedic dancers”.

YouTube currently has a 1949 clip of a one-armed and one-legged dancer called Crip Heard.

American comedian explains the US healthcare system at Edinburgh Fringe

Andrew J Lederer alive and reasonably well in Edinburgh

“I mentioned to the audience that I was hot and that I wanted to take my sweatshirt off, but that I didn’t have a shirt underneath it – I was just wearing the sweatshirt – and they yelled Take it off!” American comedian and storyteller Andrew J. Lederer told me this week.

We were at the Edinburgh Fringe.

“I can’t resist a dare,” Andrew told me, “so I took off the sweatshirt and then went Oops! I just gave the show away! Obviously, they had seen the photo, but they didn’t know if it was real. They even asked: Is it real?

“Well, I told them, there are many ways of answering that question. No matter what it is, it’s real. A real WHAT – that’s the question.”

“What was the problem?” I asked him.

“I needed heart re-adjustment,” Andrew told me. “I don’t want you to give away too many details in your blog, because the fun of the show – the rollercoaster joy of the show – is coming along with me as these things revealed themselves – always surprisingly and always unsettlingly.”

“But you had a heart operation?” I asked.

“Oh yeah,” he told me. “It was thirteen weeks ago this week.”

“And why does your Edinburgh Fringe show have the title Cold?” I asked.

Andrew’s 2 shows at the Edinburgh Fringe

“Well, I’m doing two shows on the PBH Free Fringe,” he explained. “Cold is just an overall umbrella name for the two shows because last year’s was called Cold Chicken and this year’s is called Cold Comfort and I’m performing them both at this year’s Fringe.

“Cold Chicken was about when I was having my London breakdown and about me trying to figure out what was wrong with me: was it physical or emotional? And that sent me back to America – which resulted in Cold Comfort. I may be the only guy ever to go from England to America to get medical treatment!

“I set out to find out was I really having a physical problem or an emotional problem or both. And I found out that I needed open heart surgery. And then the day before I was scheduled to go into the hospital and have myself buzz-sawed in two, the phone rings and I get the answer to the question about what had been happening to me. Only I didn’t care any more because it was cold comfort. Great! I got the answer to the question but, by then, it had become a trivial question.”

“So the two shows are connected,” I said.

“No,” said Andrew. “They’re entirely separate. One is about me in London, falling apart. And the other is about me in New York trying to find my own pieces and put them together – or find someone who can do that for me.”

“And you had a serious operation just 13 weeks ago?” I asked.

“It’s a massively serious operation,” said Andrew. “They take you offline. You’re living on a heart-lung machine. It’s as serious as it gets. I had to be emotionally prepared to die.

“I had to say to myself: This could be the last day I’m alive. They’re going to sap away my consciousness and that may be my last moment of consciousness. I posted something on Facebook that night called Last Will and Testicles.”

“You’d never been that close to possible death before?” I asked.

“Well, I’d walked into the street and there are cars in streets,” Andrew said.

“Maybe this is the year of heart problems at the Fringe,” I said. “Rick Shapiro was in the hospital for three months and got out in late June, then arrived at the Fringe at the start of August. There’s Richard Tyrone Jones and his heart failure. And Carey Marx didn’t come because of his heart attack. Then your own operation was only 13 weeks ago.”

“In New York,” said Andrew, “I go to the gym three times a week.”

“You do?” I said.

“It’s cardiac rehab,” said Andrew, “and it’s just like the gym except it’s paid for by insurance. It’s at the hospital and you wear electrodes and they watch your heart while you do it. Because of budget cutbacks or whatever, you have to put your own electrodes on.”

“You’ve moved back in New York now?” I asked. “You’ve left London?”

“Yeah.”

“You’re going to stay in New York?”

“That’s a question I’m never capable of answering. I seem to go where the money isn’t.”

“Did you go back to the US because you had health insurance there?”

“Well, I only went back because of a wonderful thing that happened while I was in London.”

“Which was?”

“I went broke. Completely. So, when I went back to America, I was poor enough to get poor people’s health insurance. In America, you’re only allowed to get health insurance if you’re rich and can afford to pay for it. Or if you’re very poor. Because they want the middle class to go away. They get in the way. The rich people want poor people to stay alive so they can exploit them. So we have a healthcare system that is, in fact, the greatest healthcare system in the world if you have it, but you’re only allowed to have it if you either have a lot of money or no money.”

“But,” I asked, “if you’re an expat and have been living in London for a few years, how can they totally know what you have? You may have money salted away.”

“You wanna know the beauty of it?” said Andrew. “They just ask you how much money you make. You need no documents of any kind.

“By the end of my London experience, I had twitching eye muscles, my neck felt like it was pulling itself apart. I didn’t know if I was having a nervous breakdown or something was wrong with me. I went to Whitechapel Hospital and they said Huh. You’re alright! It went on for months. They didn’t care. It was not an emergency as far as they were concerned.

“So I went back to the States and started searching out the answers and, over a period of more than a year, it led me to more horrible questions.”

“You were able to search out the answers for free on healthcare as well?” I asked.

“You know what it was like when I got back to the States and had access to healthcare? It was like winning one of those competitions where you get to run through a supermarket with a giant cart and put as much as you can into it as you possibly can. I’ll take a foot doctor! And here’s a cardiac specialist! And you end up with a cart that’s just full of all these guys in white coats with various specialties, brandishing their diplomas.

“I looked up all my doctors online before I chose them. There are these great websites in the States where people go online and they comment on the doctors. They give the doctor stars like he was an Edinburgh Fringe show and they write their reviews.”

“So how did you choose which doctor to go with? You went on the number of stars?”

“Yes! It’s exactly the same as in Edinburgh!”

“I want to become an American citizen,” I laughed. “Do you get financial support once you’re out of hospital?”

“No. I was out of the hospital four days after they buzz-sawed me in two.”

“So, basically,” I said, “they do it all for free but then don’t help you support yourself when you’re recovering?”

“Well, you know what?” said Andrew. “The surgeon told me – and this is one of the top one percent of cardiothoracic surgeons in the United States – he told me, You know, when you get out, you’re going to do various things and some of them might hurt and, if it hurts… don’t do it. He didn’t realise he was saying the oldest, purest medical joke in the world!”

“Have you been performing comedy in America?”

“I haven’t been doing anything! I’m a patient! I’m a professional patient!”

“Have you got a fallback place to stay in New York?”

“In the 1950s, my grandfather, a very forward-thinking man, bought a large number of cemetary plots for the family. It was a steal, he told us. You know how much it costs to buy a  piece of cemetary land?

“So there have been difficult periods of my life where my domestic circumstances would have been better if I were dead rather than alive. I should have been able to live on my cemetary plot. It’s my land! Why can’t I live on my land? I’ve lived in smaller spaces in New York.”

“This is how big?” I asked. “A bit of ground maybe seven feet by four?”

“I own whatever the amount of space is that they need to allow you to be dead. I should pitch a tent there! Who would I be hurting? Who am I going to disturb? It’s beautiful greenery and I know the people there; close relatives everywhere I turn. And yet I’m told I can’t stay there unless I’m dead and what good does it do me then? It’s in New Jersey. It’s suburban. I would be a squire. What kind of free market laissez faire capitalist country is it where a man can own a plot of land and can’t place his weary bones there unless his bones are past the point of all weariness?”

“Well, you should do it,” I told Andrew. “I think you should go and pitch a tent there for the next nine months and that could be the subject of your Fringe show next year.”