Apparently, back in the early part of the 20th century, my former college men’s chorus, the Virginia Glee Club, used to perform musical comedy. In drag. And also in blackface.
That’s what my former Club comrade Tim Jarrett discovered while digging through the archives.
Several photos are contained in the link. The blackface photos really make me cringe.
A possible origin of the vampire myth:
The myth, established well before the invention of the word “vampire,†seems to cross every culture, language and era. The Indian Baital, the Ch’ing Shih in China, and the Romanian Strigoi are but a few of its names. The creature seems to be as old as Babylonia and Sumer. Or even older.
The vampire may originate from a repressed memory we had as primates. Perhaps at some point we were — out of necessity — cannibalistic. As soon as we became sedentary, agricultural tribes with social boundaries, one seminal myth might have featured our ancestors as primitive beasts who slept in the cold loam of the earth and fed off the salty blood of the living.
Colbert I. King of the Washington Post once wrote a very telling column about how his parents instilled in him the need for punctuality. The underlining of their everyday lesson was that if you were late, you might have to run, and a young black man racing through the streets could well be detained before he reached his lawful destination.