At the tango tea we patronized the tea was
up to standard, but the dancing of the box-ankled professionals
was a disappointment. Beforehand I had been told that the scene
on the stage would be a veritable picture. And so it was--Rosa
Bonheur's Horse Fair.
As a matter of fact the best dancer I saw in Europe was a performing
trick pony in a winter circus in Berlin. I also remember with
distinctness of detail a chorusman who took part in a new Lehar
opera, there in Berlin. I do not remember him for his dancing,
because he was no clumsier of foot than his compatriots in the
chorus rank and file; or for his singing, since I could not pick
his voice out from the combined voices of the others. I remember
him because be wore spectacles--not a monocle nor yet a pair of
nose-glasses, but heavy-rimmed, double-lensed German spectacles
with gold bows extending up behind his ears like the roots of an
old-fashioned wisdom tooth.
Come to think about it, I know of no reason why a chorusman should
not wear spectacles if he needs them in his business or if he
thinks they will add to his native beauty; but the spectacle of
that bolster-built youth, dressed now as a Spanish cavalier and
now as a Venetian gondolier, prancing about, with his spectacles
goggling owlishly out at the audience, and once in a while, when
a gleam from the footlights caught on them, turning to two red-hot
disks set in the middle of his face, was a thing that is going to
linger in my memory when a lot of more important matters are
entirely forgotten.
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