Ethan Underhill, MBA Class of 2016
In the late 19th century a new variety act hit the travelling vaudeville scene, composed of three to five supremely untalented siblings at any given time. The Cherry Sisters of Iowa sang, danced, recited poetry and essays, played songs of their own composition on drum and mouth harp – all with the same absolute ineptitude. A Chicago agent with a keen eye for novelty booked them to travel the Midwest, where they met with uniformly scathing reviews and increasingly hostile audiences, their draw being just how bad they were. Their show became a sort of meta-performance, as the surreally awful productions packed venues with jeering crowds eager to see how horrible the infamous act could be, and journalists tried to outdo each other on the venom of their critiques.…