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
"The family and every one agreed that my metropolitan broadmindedness
was too much of a strain on the sense of morality of the peasantry, as
it were. No, nothing of the slightest consequence, nothing that would
have caused the inhabitants of Broadway to even arch their eyebrows. All
I did was to inhale a snootful and go out with a friend and stand the
thriving little village of Emporia up on end and tip it over. 'Tis a
strange tale. List, and I will unfold it to you. One day I was wafting
slowly and sedately down to the Boston Store for my mail when lo! and
behold, what did I see out in front of the Palace Hotel but an
automobile. Believe me when I tell you, it was the first time I had
looked a radiator in the face for a week. Two young fellows were
monkeying around the machine, and as they were nice-looking chaps I gave
them the furtive glance, and one of them stopped and asked me if he
hadn't been introduced to me in the Harlem Casino. At any other time I
would have taken his remark as a deep insult, inferring as it did that I
was so far from Forty-second street, but now I could have fell on his
neck and cried with joy. I told him that I had never met him in the
place he had mentioned, but to let it go at that, and if he even knew
where Harlem was it was introduction enough.
"Come to find out they were making a trip across the continent, and had
stopped there to get a little gasolene for the machine. We talked things
over and I found out that they knew several people I did, and anyway
they were from New York and that helped a heap. They were going to leave
that afternoon, but I prevailed upon them to stay over until the next
day. I was invited into the hotel for dinner, and we opened the first
bottle of champagne wine, as they say out West, that had been opened in
Emporia since the Governor went through. In truth, the bottle was
covered with specks, and the label had faded so you could hardly read
it, but when the cork went 'wop!' three traveling men at the next table
burst into tears.
"After we had consumed all the champagne wine they had in the snare, I
tipped them off to a speak-easy, and we decided to ride down there in
the machine, and then go for a little tour, as it were. By this time it
had been noised through the city that some one had taken the bottle out
of the show window, and a large crowd had assembled to see the
plutocrats come forth. We capered blithely out to the machine, climbed
in and hiked for the blind tiger. After the usual red tape the captain
sold us about two quarts of jig-juice--the kind that makes a jack-rabbit
spit in a bulldog's eye.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
The Sorrows of a Show Girl: A Story of the Great "White Way" — John Shaqi
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