Carl Sandburg

Vaudeville Dancer

ELSIE FLIMMERWON, you got a job now with a jazz outfit in vaudeville.
 
The houses go wild when you finish the act shimmying a fast shimmy to The Livery Stable Blues.
 
It is long ago, Elsie Flimmerwon, I saw your mother over a washtub in a grape arbor when your father came with the locomotor ataxia shuffle.
 
It is long ago, Elsie, and now they spell your name with an electric sign.
 
Then you were a little thing in checked gingham and your mother wiped your nose and said: You little fool, keep off the streets.
 
Now you are a big girl at last and streetfuls of people read your name and a line of people shaped like a letter S stand at the box office hoping to see you shimmy.
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