Ruth Draper was born in New York in 1884. When she was very young, she entertained her siblings by sitting on a window seat in the nursery of her family's brownstone, on East Forty-seventh Street, and imitating grownups they knew, among them the tailor who made their clothes. By the time she was in her mid-thirties, she was performing, alone, on stages all over the world. She wrote all her own material. She abhorred …
SOURCE: The New Yorker at 11:00PM on December 25, 2016