Sunday, October 4, 2009

Story 2 - Martha Raye USO Show

As Military Police we provided security at USO shows on base. Martha Raye brought her Hello Dolly show which was staged in one of the large hangers.  Sergeant Thompson was very excited as he was a huge fan of Martha Raye. The show was great, very entertaining with lots of beautiful young women dancers.  At one point early in the show the guys in the audience went a little crazy when the girls who were wearing long dresses showed off their legs.  Ms. Raye "broke character" and rushed to the apron and said "Of course they have nice legs, their all of twenty years old.  But how's this for a fifty year old woman?"  And then she hiked up her skirt to display a very nice pair of legs, fifty or not.


After the show we were invited to the case party.  Sarge was beside himself; he just might meet his idol.  The party was held in the hosting helicopter unit's Officer's Club.  Sarge, who if not an alcoholic was right next to it, quickly had a couple of Scotch on the rocks and was doing great. His feet were nowhere near the floor.  A few minutes later one of the show's crew announced that Ms. Raye was not feeling well and would not be coming to the party.  Sarge was devastated and compensated with a few more Scotch on the rocks. 


But, then, there she was.  Martha Raye did make her appearance. The show must go on!  Nearly everyone in the room knew by now that Sergeant Thompson had an infatuation with Ms. Raye and the Colonel brought her over and introduced them.  Ms Raye, with a drink in her hand, entertained us with jokes and stories for at least ten minutes.  At some point it became just a conversation between her and sarge.  She told him that this was her third trip to Vietnam and that she would always see these signs for massage parlors and wanted to know if the massages here was as good as one might get in large European or American cities.  Our intrepid Sergeant replied, "Well, Ms. Raye, I've never had a massage in no fancy city parlor, but after a long, hot day eating dust on convoy duty, there's nothing like a steam job and a blow bath!" Of course he was totally unaware of what he had just said.  Ms. Raye the trooper that she was barely blinked and continued chatting with good old sarge as those of us standing around nearly died of laughter.  The next morning we added to Sergeant Thompson's hungover misery with blow by blow renditions of the conversation. 

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