Create, Then Take a Break

This is a short, quick, and easy read.

Some Sample Anecdotes:

• John Barrymore was noted as much for his dissipation as for his acting. While acting in Hamlet after a night of revelry, he began the "To be or not to be" soliloquy, but in the middle of the speech found it necessary to retire to the side of the stage so he could vomit. Later, he was complimented for this innovation: "I say, Barrymore, that was the most daring and perhaps the most effective innovation ever offered. I refer to your deliberate pausing in the midst of the soliloquy to retire, almost, from the scene. May I congratulate you upon such imaginative business? You seemed quite distraught. But it was effective!"

• Jerome K. Jerome (1859-1927) noticed something odd about the critics who reviewed his books. When they reviewed his first book, they denounced it as "rubbish." However, when they reviewed his second book, they denounced it as an unworthy successor to his first book, which had been excellent.

• When George Balanchine took his New York City Ballet on tour to his native Russia, he was displeased with the behavior of his dancers, who engaged in a food fight in a Russian dining room because they found the food unappetizing. Mr. Balanchine chewed out his dancers, telling them that they were ambassadors from the United States to Russia and such behavior was unacceptable. Suzanne Farrell once mentioned to him that she liked the omelets, and trying to be helpful, Mr. Balanchine arranged with the Russian cooks to feed her omelets for breakfast, lunch, and supper. She ate hundreds of eggs during the tour.

• Actress Maud Gill once wore a large picture hat on stage. Before one performance, a mouse got into the hat, and Ms. Maud put on the hat and unknowingly carried the mouse with her on stage, where the mouse's desperate attempts to escape entangled it in her hair. She was forced to take off the hat on stage, and the audience gasped at her taste in hairstyles.

• In 1996, one of the student hacks (pranks) at MIT was the replacing of the "No Trespassing" signs at the entrance to the computer clusters with signs that stated, "You must be at least this smart to use Athena workstations," complete with a graph that charted levels of intelligence. The bottom intelligence level was "Urchins who log in as root." In the middle intelligence levels were "average Harvard student," "average B.U. [Boston University] student," and "average CalTech student." Holding the top intelligence level was "below-average MIT student." In the 1980s an elevator hacker replaced the word "UP" with "Heaven" and the word "DOWN" with "MIT."