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Some of the costumes looked as though they owed their inspiration to Bakst's designs for the Russian ballet or perhaps Bakst obtained his ideas in Djokjakarta; others were strongly reminiscent of Louis XIV's era, of the courts of the great Indian princes, of the Ziegfeld Follies. The procession was led by four peasant women bearing trays of vegetables and fruits, symbols of fecundity, I assumed.
And later, when I've been called in to help undo the straps, I gets a glimpse of the exhibit. Morning and afternoon frocks in one, evening gowns in another, the steamer trunk full of shoes, besides all the hats. "Huh!" says I, on the side to Vee. "Carries all her own scenery, don't she? Say, there's enough to outfit a Ziegfeld song revue."
Ziegfeld builds a new Follies show around twelve pairs of winsome knee joints. North Dakota blows down the Nonpartisan League and discovers that darned thing was loaded in both barrels. The Prussians are pained to note that for some reason or other a number of people seem to harbor a grudge against them.
Florenz Ziegfeld took over as many of the tunes and gestures as he could buy for his Follies of that season, but he neglected to import the one essential quality of the entertainment, its style, for the exploitation of which Negro players were indispensable. All of which is merely by way of prelude to what I feel must be something in the nature of lyric outburst and verbal explosion.
Leave behind the turning mill wheel, American, and come into the Avenue de Choisy, where over a preglacial store a couple of cornets baffle the night and set a hundred feet in motion, feet from the Gobelin quarter, feet from the Butte-aux-Cailles! More leathery feet, to be sure, than the suéde feet of the Ziegfeld Montmartre, but kicking up a different wax dust, the wax dust of a different Paris.
Mr. Ziegfeld never produced so fantastic and colorful a spectacle. It would have been the envy and the despair of that prince of showmen, the late Phineas T. Barnum.
Flo Ziegfeld has nothing on George, the head barber, when it comes to an eye for color and a sense for curve. But they are busy at the moment. The hair-tonic Dons and the mud-pack Romeos are giving the girls a heavy play. Peewee alone is at leisure. Therefore let us gallop quickly to the memoirs. "H'm," says Peewee, "I'll tell you about men. Of course what I say doesn't include all men.
This is an annual entertainment by which Chicago sets great store. All the smartest and best-looking of the younger set take part in it, in costumes that would do credit to Mr. Ziegfeld, and as much of Chicago as is willing and able to pay five dollars a seat for the privilege is welcome to come and look.
Yet I must admit that, when the anchor of the Negros splashed into the blue waters off Boeleleng, on the northern coast of the island, and a boat's crew of white-clad Filipinos rowed me ashore, I half expected to find a Balinese edition of the Ziegfeld Follies chorus waiting to greet me with demonstrations of welcome and garlands of flowers.
There it is the same curious grin, the lugubrious apology of a grin, the weary, pessimistic child of a grin. The Great Actors, eager-eyed and silent, sit back on their thrones. The door of the Valhalla of Great Actors swings slowly shut. No Flo Ziegfeld lighting this time, but a great shoot of sunshine for a "garden." And the music different, easier to sing to, somehow. Music of harps and flutes.
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