Jasper County Democrat, Volume 6, Number 47, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 27 February 1904 — Write Notes to Themselves. [ARTICLE]

Write Notes to Themselves.

“Actors are great hands to write ‘mash’ notes to themselves,” said a stage manager. “The leading young men, you see—the heroes that marry the beautiful girls—are supposed to attract to the theater myriads of young women. They draw big pay on this account; their friends talk seriously of the powerful, almost hypnotic, influences that they exert on romantic females. This power is the stock in trade of the actor who travels on his beauty instead of on his art, and he must always have tangible proof of it. So if the young women don’t come up each mail with a bunch of authentic mash notes, he sees to it anyway that he gets mash notes all right. He times them so that they reach the theater during rehearsal. The manager every afternoon'brings them to him—a half dozen pink nnd blue and cream envelopes, smelling of violet and orris. He takes them with a guffaw, reads them, passes them around. Every one pretends to be amused at their silly contents, but the minute the actor’s back is turned the murmur passes back nnd forth: ‘They’re fakes. He wrote them himself. He spends two hours a day writing himself mash notes.’ To tell the truth, this actor gets a number of authentic mash notes, but nobody believes it. It is thought that every note is a fake.”—Washington Post.