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Vaudeville Dancer

by Carl Sandburg, 1920

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.

Published in Smoke and Steel
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