The Freedonia Gazette Open House 25th Annual Commemorative Root Beer

Paul Wesolowski, editor, is holding the 25th-- and possibly last-- Annual Freedonia Gazette Open House on  Sun., May 27. He is the world's foremost Marx Bros. expert and his collection is astounding in both breadth and depth. Returning after being conspicuously absent last year is the great video producer Robert Bader, who, every year scours the world's film archives to come up with clips that one has not only never seen, but did not even know ever existed. (Last year, your humble correspondent was the de facto programmer using Paul's discs.)

Paul's other passions are cacti and regional root beers, so every year, I brew a cactus-flavored root beer with a Marx-themed label, and here is this year's label:



COPACABANA was a 1947 movie centering around the famous NYC nightclub. Groucho is Lionel Q. Devereaux, an agent whose client/fiancee (Carmen Miranda), a Brazilian bombshell, also impersonates a French chanteuse (don't ask). In keeping with this theme of duality, Groucho the agent, who since his last movie, A NIGHT IN CASABLANCA, had grown an actual mustache in real life (in previous movies, his mustache was greasepaint), introduces a hot young comic-- Groucho, avec greasepaint mustache, who sings the song, "Go West, Young Man" by Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby. (I cannot confirm this, but I assume the song was in the first draft of the Marx Bros. movie GO WEST, which was written by Kalmar and Ruby.) "Young" Groucho sing with pretty cowgirls against a backdrop of painted cacti. Well, Paul and Bob will get the reference.