The Sorrows of a Show Girl: A Story of the Great "White Way"McGaffey, Kenneth
General
The Sorrows of a Show Girl: A Story of the Great "White Way"
McGaffey, Kenneth
Theater -- Fiction
"Gee, but that Chicago is a bum town, and yet in Emporia they look upon
it as a Mecca of pleasure. The only pleasure I ever got there was trying
to analyze the smells from the stock yards. They don't eat anything in
Chicago but chop suey. Did you ever shoot any of that junk into your
system? Them can have it that likes it; but never again for muh. You get
it in a little dish, and the blooming stuff smells as if it was some
relation to a poultice; you eat it and then go home and chew all the
enamel off the bed. No, I don't know what it is made of; if I did I
wouldn't eat it. That's the only thing Chicago is good for, chop suey
and smells. When they get through talking about the World's Fair perhaps
they will think up some new form of amusement. I met a wop in Chicago,
one of these real romantic kind that only grow there. I was seated in a
secluded corner of the ladies' waiting room of the Annex, and he came up
and asked me if I didn't want to step in the Pompeian room and hear the
waters of the fountain lapping up against the marble. I told him I much
preferred to be up against a bottle of wine and do the lapping myself.
He, with that true Chicago gallantry, said, 'Excuse me first, I want to
'phone a friend.'
"I'm glad I didn't hold my breath while he was gone. I think he must
have taken a surface car for Oak Park. Those Chicago rum-dums are the
true sports, all right, all right. If necessity compels them to buy
anything stronger than beer they commence to look sassy at the waiter
and talk loud. Chicago is sure rightly named when they call it the Windy
City. You just ought to have heard the line of jolly some of those boys
tried to hand out to me. To me, mind you, to me! They must have thought
that I was some unsophisticated young ingenue that never had been
further away from State street than an occasional excursion across the
lake to St. Joe.
"I sloshed around town for a couple of days just to give those people a
change from the usual run of Randolph street romps, then I hit the
hummer for bleeding Kansas and Emporia.
"Say, I had a great first entrance into that burg and nothing else; but
a crate of lemons got off to crab the act. When I climb down off the
hurdle, behold, the village choir right there on the job to see the
train come in. The arrival of the train--notice the train--is what you
might call the main event of the day. As soon as the village yokels saw
my trunks being unloaded they all did the grand duck for the theatre to
strike the house manager, thinking it was a show. I hadn't tipped my
mitt to the folks, so they were not at the tank to give me the parental
embrace, but after giving the necessary instructions to the baggage man
I climbed into the Palace Hotel bus and romped up to my ancestors'
abode.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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