Excerpt from Niagra Falls All Over Again by Elizabeth McCracken, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

It's like this: Rocky has just been hired at a cheese factory. He's in charge of making the holes in the Swiss, but he doesn't know how. I'm the foreman, I say, A hole is nothing! You're bothering me now about nothing? (Maybe it doesn't sound funny on the page, but Beethoven on the page is just black dots.) Rocky gets nervous, and more nervous, and downright panicked about the holes, the nothing.

Onstage with Rocky, I was handsomer, funnier. If anyone in the audience recognized the Dutch comic made over into the fierce foreman, they forgave me. The crowd was no longer a squawk box worked by a crank --- turn that crank harder! --- but what they were: a bunch of gorgeous people who happened to find us very, very funny. Then suddenly Rocky ad-libbed in a big way: he jumped into my arms, all the way off the floor, so I was cradling him. Oof. Like a lady scared of a mouse, and so I said, "What are you, a man or a mouse?"

"Mouse," he said in his squeakiest voice.

"You're a mouse in a cheese factory," I told him. "You're living the life of Reilly." I didn't put him down. I was twenty years old, I could lift anything if an audience was involved.

"I'm scared," he said.

"Oh, Rocky," I said dotingly. "Poor Rocky. Shall I sing you a song?"

"Uh-huh," he said.

So I started Brahms's lullaby.

"Not that one," he said.

"Okay." I tried Rockabye Baby.

"No!" He thumped me on the chest.

Rockabye Your Baby with a Dixie Melody? No. Beautiful Dreamer? Worse. You Made Me Love You? Out of the question. Abba-Dabba Honeymoon?

A sly nod, a settling in.

It's almost impossible to hold on to 180 pounds of snuggling comic, but I managed. "You better sing with me, folks," I told the audience, "or we'll be here all night." So they joined in, and that night five hundred people sang Rocky Carter to sleep for the first time. That's the bit we became famous for: Why Don't You Sleep? We did it a million times, in the movies, on radio, on TV. Veronica Lake sang Rocky to sleep, and Dan Dailey, and Bing Crosby. Always a different ridiculous song. Rocky said it was our funniest bit. Rock was educated --- Harvard, he said sometimes, Princeton others, School of the Street, he told reporters. Anyhow, he studied things. What made Chaplin great? Keaton? A kind of tenderness and need, he said, not like these jokers everywhere. Why Don't You Sleep would be how people remembered us, he said. It would be our signature.

Excerpted from Niagara Falls All Over Again by Elizabeth McCracken Copyright 2001 by Elizabeth McCracken. Excerpted by permission of Dell, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.