Summary
Inside a sun-drenched villa that might as well be a fever dream of 1922, Xenophon Socrates O’Brien—a name so baroque it clangs like tarnished brass—presides over a salon of flappers whose jazz-age limbs twitch to rhythms he deems sacrilegious. With the indignation of a fallen Olympian, he denounces their shimmy as degenerate, extolling the marble poise of antique dancers who once spun under Attic moons. The girls, equal parts mischief and lace, filch every tablecloth, napkin, and curtain until the house stands naked, its windows blinking like startled eyes. On the emerald lawn they drape themselves in improvised chitons, breasts bound by safety pins, ankles circled with ivy torn from the garden gate. Enter the Professor, a self-anointed hierophant of the shimmy, his briefcase stuffed with hyphenated credentials and hips that lie. Lessons devolve into entropy: torsos torque, laurels wilt, and the choreography collapses into a centrifugal carousel of petticoats and panic. When the music wheezes its last, the Professor—now a tipsy satyr in borrowed drapery—spirals to the turf, laurel cocked like a broken halo, while the girls scatter, giggling, into the hush of twilight that tastes of warm gin and fading empire.
Synopsis
Xenophon Socrates O'Brien cannot understand the modern dance. He censures the girls for their modern ways and tells them that the ancient Greeks were more graceful and entertaining. The maidens take the cue, appropriate all the linen they can find in the house and appear on the lawn as classic dancers. A professor of the " shimmy dance " is introduced to instruct them in this art. His lessons seem to confuse rather than instruct and the dance ends in a "merry-go-round" with the Professor, who has bedecked himself in Greek costume, in a state of collapse.
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