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The man Ah love Would not have gone nowhere " Listen for the tom-tom behind the hurrah. Watch for the torches of Kypris and Corinth behind the glare of the tungstens. This is the immemorial bacchanal lurching through the kaleidoscope of the centuries. Pan with a bootlegger's grin and a checked suit. Dionysius with a saxophone to his lips. And the dance of Paphos called now the shimmie.
"Shimmie," I echoed, and, my mind skipping back: "Shemdance! Shame Dance! I see!" "Why?" he demanded, intrigued by my preoccupation. "Nothing. It just reminded me of something." Then he lifted a hand and smote himself on the thigh. "Me, too! By jinks! Say, I'd almost forgot that." He hitched his chair upon me; held me down with a forefinger. "Listen. That was funny. It was one night last fall.
Say! Well, I can't tell you, but talk about Shimmie! Say, she's like a dead one come to life." "Yes," I agreed, "yes. But what about the man?" "Well, that man, now. The record's comin' to the end and I go back in to start it over. And, here's this hobo, come in behind me. "'What's that? says he, pointin' to the record I got in my hand. "Then he grabs it and looks it over.
That's 'Paragon Park. That is the old original first 'Shimmie' dance with whiskers two foot long " "The original what?" "Shimmie! Shimmie! Say, honest to God, don't you know ?" And with his shoulders he made a wriggling gesture in appeal to my wits, the crudest burlesque, it seemed, of a divinely abominable gesture in my memory. "That?" he queried. "Eh?"
Such glimpses, for example, as I had in America of the movement known as the Shimmie Shake filled me with alarm, while Orientals have been known to display boredom at the Russian Ballet. Personally I adore the Russian Ballet, but I found the Nautch very fatiguing.
"I'll take one," I said to him. "What you saw was the finest exhibition of the 'Shimmie' you ever clapped an eye upon. Am I right?" The young fellow's mouth hung open. He stared at me. "Half undressed! Honest! That nigger woman! Horse blanket, feed sack, ar'tics where was they? Shimmie? Say! Can you imagine, in that there prairie depot at three in the mornin', and a wind howlin' under the floor?
Well, Agamemnon was stabbed in his bath-tub. And Charlotte Corday stabbed Marat in his bath-tub. Nothing new besides the sun, is there? Why only yesterday I picked up a musical-comedy score that mast have been at least twenty years old; and there on the cover it said "The Shimmies of Normandy," but shimmie was spelt the old way, with a "C." THE YOUNG MAN: I loathe these modern dances.
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