Carl Sandburg (1878–1967). Smoke and Steel. 1922. VIII. Circles of Doors 19. 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. 5 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.
