Gloria: Race and gender impersonations were a mainstay of vaudeville and are thus fairly common in the vaudeville-inspired films of the early sound era. At the risk of a shameless plug, I discuss a number of examples of these in my book, WHAT MADE PISTACHIO NUTS?: EARLY SOUND COMEDY AND THE VAUDEVILLE AESTHETIC. Certain stars, most notably Eddie Cantor, made blackface a trademark. Cantor works a blackface number into everyone of his films, sometimes where it is comically in appropriate, as in ROMAN SCANDELS where he plays a Ethiopean beauty specialist in ancient Rome, or in ALI BABA GOES TO TOWN, when he puts on blackface in order to better communicate with Nubian slaves. In Cantor's films, as in other early sound comedies, the line between what constitutes a staged performance and diagetic reality is complex. Often, Cantor puts on black face or drag (see PALMY DAYS) as a disguise but then circumstances force him to perform. (See for example WHOOPEE). The same is true of Wheeler and Woolsey who also do blackface or crossdressing numbers. The Peace Conference sequence in DIPLOMANIACS has the boys addressing the delegates in blackface after a bomb explodes but evolves into a minstrel number in which the entire conference is in blackface. Wheeler was a skilled female-impersonator as can be seen in several of their films, most notably PEACH O'RENO where he appears in drag for much of the movie and does a sidespliting parody of the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers musicals being made at that same studio, RKO, during the period. Cantor also impersonates native Americans (in WHOOPEE, where he moves back and forth between Yidish and pseudo-tribal patter) and other ethnic types (such as hispanics in KID FROM SPAIN). Winnie Lightner, a female clown at Warner Brothers, also does blackface and male-impersonation (for comic effect), most notably in SIDESHOW. (I have a long discussion of her various strategies of masquerade in the book.) What I argue is that the vaudeville aesthetic's focus on performance virtuosity meant that such layered-performances were common, helping to showcase the range of the performer's skills and to allow them to slip fluidly in and out of multiple roles. The most extreme example of this strategy might be El Brendel's one-man-show in JUST IMAGINE, which perfectly records a long-standing stage tradition. --Henry Jenkins