ALLEZ HOOP!

New Zealand Listener, Volume 35, Issue 887, 3 August 1956, Page 19

ALLEZ HOOP!

MBs: AMELIA JENKS BLOOMER was born May 27, 1818, at Homer, New York. In 1849 she took up the idea of reform in women’s clothes and the wearing of a short dress with loose trousers gathered at the ankle. Gradually the name "bloomers" became attached to any divided skirt or knickerbocker dress for women, Mrs. Bloomer had a genius for dedication and besides bloomers she earnestly supported temperance, women’s suffrage and a number of other moral and political reforms, all concerned with women’s rights. In January, 1849, she published a newspaper, The Lily, which began with a circulation of 200 copies. It jumped to over 4000 in four years, an increase which circulation managers today well might envy, but would be hard put to emulate. You see, Mrs. Bloomer did it by appearing on lecture platforms wearing her scandalous garments. During this period, the name "Dolly" Bloomer was given first to Mrs. Bloomer, then to any girl sufficiently emancipated or game enough to copy her. Not long ago, two bright Broadway showfolk, Harold Arlen, the composer, and E. Y. Harburg, the lyric writer (who wrote, among other hits, "We’re Off to See the Wizard" for The Wizard of Oz), got together on the Bloomer story. They

decided to concentrate on the adventures of another member of the clan (probably mythical), Miss Evelina Applegate, niece to the redoubtable Mrs. Dolly. The Arlen-

Harburg show was called The Bloomer | Girl, and starred Celeste Holm as Miss | Evelina, with Harold Arlen himself also in the cast. Music from the show will be heard in YA Theatre of Music on Saturday, August 1. Evelina is the youngest, prettiist and only unwed daughter of Horatio Applegate, the hoop-skirt magnate of the North. She is very much influenced by. her aunt’s determination to do away with the hoops women wore to make them look more feminine. Her father, | very worried, arranges a match for her with Jeff (David Brooks), the scion of a wealthy Southern family. Though Evelina resents this, she nevertheless falls victim to the young man’s charm and he, instead of heading her off from. her liberal tendencies, helps her to arrange the escape of a slave-his own slave, Pompey, no less-via the underground "railroad." At a garden party show which Horatio Applegate has arranged for his buyers to show off the "super-hoop" which Evelina is to model, she shows herself a worthy disciple of her aunt by abruptly dropping the "super-hoop" in a mid-career and appearing in bloomers. Worse still, Mrs. "Dolly" and Evelina are gaoled for organising slave escapes, but are finally freed in time to present a performance of Uncle Tom's Cabin. Jeff leaves to join the Southern forces while all the Applegate men fight with the Unionists. Mrs. Dolly, vindicated in her ideas, happily announces that the Governor has taken over Applegate’s hoop factory for the manufacture of army uniforms. She also tells Evelina that, on his way south, Jeff has heard Lincoln speak, and now feels that the way of equality and freedom for all is | the right way. So all ends happily for | the Bloomer girl.