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In our experience, Vaudeville is more a state of mind than an actual place. We knew the term was used to describe turn-of-the-century stage shows featuring a variety of dance, song, humor, and magic, but we weren't sure if there was a geographical origin to the name. Luckily, a quick visit to Yahoo!'s Vaudeville category helped clear things up. First stop: the American Vaudeville Museum, which offered brief biographical profiles of the era's performers, but nothing much on the history and origin of the term. Then we headed over to Vaudeville Memories, a stunning collection of links to news,
history, sound clips, movies, trivia, and much more. It includes both original essays and external links. We were impressed with the depth of information, but still, no clue to the etymology of Vaudeville. Undaunted, we continued to browse Yahoo!'s listed sites. After several false starts, we finally located the magic link on Vaudeville Alley's Vaudeville Resource Page. They pointed us to an entry in Microsoft's Encarta Encyclopedia that clearly detailed the history of Vaudeville: "The term was derived from the name of a valley in France (vau de Vire) that gave rise to a type of humorous drinking song. Later the name
was corrupted to voix de ville ('street voices'), and such songs were frequently inserted into spoken or pantomimed dramas." From there, it was a snap to enter "vau de Vire" into the Yahoo! search box and come up with even more information, including a nice article from Cool Word of the Day.
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