Not Even In Paris Did The Tango Experts Compare With The Tango
Experts One Sees In America.
At this juncture I pause a moment,
giving opportunity for some carping critic to rise and call my
attention to the fact that perhaps the most distinguished of the
early school of turkey-trotters bears a French name and came to
us from Paris.
To which I reply that so he does and so he did;
but I add then the counter-argument that he came to us by way of
Paris, at the conclusion of a round trip that started in the old
Fourth Ward of the Borough of Manhattan, city of Greater New York;
for he was born and bred on the East Side - and, moreover, was born
bearing the name of a race of kings famous in the south of Ireland
and along the Bowery. And he learned his art - not only the rudiments
of it but the final finished polish of it - in the dancehalls of
Third Avenue, where the best slow-time dancers on earth come from.
It was after he had acquired a French accent and had Gallicized
his name, thereby causing a general turning-over of old settlers
in the graveyards of the County Clare, that he returned to us, a
conspicuous figure in the world of art and fashion, and was able
to get twenty-five dollars an hour for teaching the sons and
daughters of our richest families to trip the light tanfastic go.
At the same time, be it understood, I am not here to muckrake the
past of one so prominent and affluent in the most honored and
lucrative of modern professions; but facts are facts, and these
particular facts are quoted here to bind and buttress my claim
that the best dancers are the American dancers.
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