Q: "Act in one"

[Joel S. Berson]

Thanks, Doug.  Your second below has good
context.  And the mention of "vaudeville" helped
me narrow Google Book search:  "act in one" and
"vaudeville" returned yours, another book from
1915 -- and a hit from the American Thesaurus of
Slang: A Complete Reference Book of Colloquial
Speech, by Lester V. Berrey, Melvín van den Bark
(1953), Page 573!  But the snippet view for the
last doesn't display "act in one".

In any case, I will submit "act in one" since
it's not in OED2 -- except under "olio"!  (I
missed this earlier, by not remembering to search also for the plural.)

1928 Amer. Speech IV. 68 Behind these
drops,...are the oleos, or act-curtains.
These...are used for small vaudeville acts....
Such acts...are termed oleo acts, or acts in one.

Joel

At 3/1/2007 09:40 PM, Doug Wilson wrote:
>I haven't read these carefully but the "act in one" is described in this
>book about vaudeville from 1915 ...
>
>ftp://opensource.nchc.org.tw/gutenberg/etext04/vaude10.txt
>
>... and in another book from 1915 ...
>
>http://books.google.com/books?vid=OCLC00445272&id=upFutQVhZh8C&pg=PA1&lpg=PA1&dq=%22fanny+venable+cannon%22+%22writing+and+selling%22
>
>-- Doug Wilson
>
>
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