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.
After this digression let us hurry right back to that loyal Berliner
whom we left seated in the Palais du Danse on the Behrenstrasse,
waiting for the hour of two in the morning to come. The hour of
two in the morning does come; the lights die down; the dancers
pick up their heavy feet - it takes an effort to pick up those
Continental feet - and quit the waxen floor; the Oberkellner comes
round with his gold chain of office dangling on his breast and
collects for the wine, and our German friend, politely inhaling
his yawns, gets up and goes elsewhere to finish his good time.
And, goldarn it, how he does dread it! Yet he goes, faithful soul
that he is.
He goes, let us say, to the Pavilion Mascotte - no dancing, but
plenty of drinking and music and food - which opens at two and stays
open until four, when it shuts up shop in order that another place
in the nature of a cabaret may open. And so, between five and six
o'clock in the morning of the new day, when the lady garbagemen
and the gentlemen chambermaids of the German capital are abroad
on their several duties, he journeys homeward, and so, as Mr. Pepys
says, to bed, with nothing disagreeable to look forward to except
repeating the same dose all over again the coming night.
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