What happens
Fred Allen hosts the Town Hall Tonight variety show, opening with a parade to the Old Town Hall and a welcome from Harry Von Zell. Among the comic sketches, a bridegroom named Gladstone and a bride named Myrtle arrive at a church wedding, where an Internal Revenue man named Mr. Fitch has come to collect a new tax on weddings, and the minister and organist must decide how to handle the fee. The episode was broadcast on December 16, 1936, on CBS and NBC.
The Old Town Hall, a radio variety program broadcast from a studio, with comic sketches set in a New York wedding chapel and a Santa Claus office.
Characters: Fred Allen, Harry Von Zell, Peter van Steeden, Portland Hoffa, Kenny Delmar, Minerva Pious, Gladstone, Myrtle
Listen for: The wedding sketch, in which the minister and organist haggle over a new government tax on marriage fees.
Written from the episode itself; it never gives away the ending. Every recording is remastered for the stream: cleaned of rumble, hiss and mains hum (and the old TV whine where we found it), then levelled in two passes to steady broadcast loudness, so one show is never quieter than the next.