everything is jake
what is life but a bubble
I ask anyway
I was looking for a specific James Thurber quote about being content to sit in the backseat of a car, not drive and read the burma-shave signs and found this blog that reviews the back issues of the New Yorker Magazine.
Scrolling through the posts, the column titled Table for Two and subtitled for this edition of the New Yorker, Everything’s Jake.
In the movie, The Sting, you might remember Robert Redford tells the waitress (the unknown hit lady assigned to kill Redford) to go open the window a back restroom saying, “Just do what I tell ya and everything’ll be jake.”
Everything’s Jake, according to Wikipedia is “a slang expression from the Roaring Twenties in the United States, meaning “everything is in good order”.
The column was written by Lois Long, who at 23 years old, again according to Wikipedia, was hired to review the speakeasies of New York for the New Yorker. Her witty, satirical column was called “When Nights are Bold,” the title of which changed to “Tables for Two” with the issue for September 12, 1925 and ran until June 6, 1931.
In this column she closed with the line, “What is life but a bubble, I ask you, anyway?”
23 years old, living in New York during the Roaring 20’s and tasked with reviewing illegal speakeasies.
What is life but a bubble?
I ask you, anyway!
Everything is jake!
No Haiku For You 