Kansas University Weekly.
49
Eidraquy.
Wool-Gathering.
BEING A TRUE NARRATIVE OF A PRIVATE EXHIBITION IN BUZZARD'S ROOST.
It was a crisp night and the roofs of Lawrence were blanketed with snow and serenity. High above the roofs and the snow and the serenity shone the yellow lights from the windows of Buzzard's Roost where the conversation had drifted upon the topic of dancing. Two-Step had just asserted that the two-step was the best of all dances.
"You don't use that word best in a moral sense?" asked Grubb.
"No sir!" retorted Two-Step. "I use it in an aesthetic sense, or rather in a utilitarian sense. When I say best I mean just best. See? And what is good wine, or good music, or good art, or good tobacco? Why, it is good only so far as it gives pleasure. And the best thing is the most pleasing. So as I said, the best dance is the two-step."
"Bad aesthetics." said Daub. "The best is the waltz. The foundation of art is the curved line, and only in the waltz do you see the grand elementary principles of art portrayed in living curves. You feel them as you wind thro' the sinuous waltz step, you hear them in the three beat measures which are the basis of English poetry. Ah! to watch the radiating curves of some limp skirt as it whips to the beat of a wavy waltz is to dream of mighty art yet untraced by the artist's hand."
"Bah!" said Grubb the anarchist. "The best dance is the galop. There you dash forward like a mad hurricane, you feel yourself a hero sweeping enemies before you, you finish your dance feeling that you've accomplished something more than poking along to music. Oh! for the mildest, maddest, bacchanalian exhaltation give me the galop."
"The polka suits me all right," said Scribe.
"Polka! Polka!" cried Daub. "Why, man, you must not know how to dance. The polka! Gads! but you have a depraved aesthetic taste!
Why the polka is fit only for a stiff, angular old maid in a starched skirt. It is just a skipping; it's no dance. Why, Booth, am I not right?"
"The dance that pleases me most contains the beauties of all others," said Booth. "It is the floating poetry of motion, the silent language of gesture that speaks what the tongue can not, the diaphanous whirl of music half visible, the ravishing display of evanescent color that leaves color echoes in the eye, the happy rhythm of angel music, the—"
"Hold on," cried all in chorus. "You've named enough to make it the best; now name the dance."
"The skirt dance."
"Oh shucks!" said Two-Step. "You're thinking more about dancers than about dances."
"Booth thinks only of the stage, boys," said Daub.
"He thinks about skirts, too," said Scribe.
"Now get funny!" said Booth sarcastically as he arose from his chair. "When you're thro' I'll go on. I know a fellow in Kansas City who dances the skirt dance better than any woman on the stage and he dances it with nothing more than a table cloth. So there goes your stage and your skirts. More than that I took lessons in his steps and could give you a skirt dance right here if I had a sheet or a big table cloth."
"By Jove, boys," said the chorus, "find him something and let him dance."
So they took down a large lace window curtain. Booth took off his shoes and his coat. Then they tied the curtain about his waist, spread a rug under his feet, and Scribe took his seat at the piano.
"Reel off the Skirt Dance," cried Booth who was ready.
The music began rippling and Booth led off with a skipity-hopty...skipty-hopty...
skipty, skipty, skipity; hop.
He advanced and retreated three times and