“What Will You Be? It’s Up to You!”

Abstract

Ray Bolger was descended from Irish Catholic Republicans. Chapter 1 explores his origins in Boston, including details of his nuclear family. Also discussed is Bolger’s pre-entertainment career of being an office clerk for New England Mutual Life insurance. He learned to dance informally on the streets of Boston in a style called “eccentric dance,” a tradition of stylized physical comedy that exploded in America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Its origins could be traced all the way back to pantomime performed in Ancient Greece. Even so, Bolger most definitely “came up the hard way”—attaining success and notoriety only by overcoming difficult circumstances. The events that led to his beginnings as a dancer are explored, as well as his first professional opportunities as a comic and a dancer in repertory theater and vaudeville.