The Daily Beast reports that wealthy Russians are using ambulances to avoid the ever-worsening traffic jams in Moscow. Maybe they don’t know it, but they’re following in the footsteps of the great showman, who used the same trick back in the 1930s, when he was appearing in one radio play after another:
I discovered there was no law in New York that you had to be sick to travel in an ambulance. So I hired the ambulance, and I would go from CBS to NBC. They’d hold an elevator for me. I’d go up to the fifth floor, go into the studio, whichever I was booked for. I’d say, ”What’s the character?” They’d say, ”Eighty-year-old Chinaman,” and I’d go on and do the eighty-year-old Chinaman, and then rush off somewhere else.