This was written by Cynthia MacGregor [CynthiaMacGregor@aol.com] and published on PUNY.

It was to be the concert of the decade. Broadway’s greatest luminaries were going to spruce up the old theatre and make it usable again, then give a concert that night to celebrate the refurbishing.

The concert would feature music and lyrics from the likes of Rodgers and Hammerstein, Irving Berlin, and Jerome Kern, all of whom would first pitch in to spruce the place up. They painted, they plastered (and Larry Hart *got* plastered), they did it all, and finally the building was as beautiful as it had been in its glory days.

There was just one problem–there was no heat in the building.

The songwriters united to look around for the man who was supposed to have brought the heating fuel in, and they spread out with just one question in mind: “Where’s that coal porter?”