The Shimmy Gym

In a moth-eaten dancehall that doubles as life’s antechamber, starveling hoofer Bobby Burns—knees like busted hinges, shoes held together with spit and resentment—trades his last nickel for a turn on the boards. The joint, a sagging warehouse christened The Shimmy Gym, is part honky-tonk, part purgatory: mirrored walls sweat gin, chandeliers drip wax like slow confession, and every fox-trot is a plea bargain with fate. Enter Jobyna Ralston, a dime-a-dance girl whose eyelashes carry the weight of unwritten sonnets; she glides across the floor as if the wood owed her interest. Between Charleston kicks and trombone growls, the pair sketch a romance in cigarette smoke—ephemeral, acrid, yet glowing like phosphor on a midnight tide. But the management, a troika of chalk-stripe sharks, runs a ledger where hearts are debits and souls collateral. When Burns tries to buy Ralston’s contract—cash scraped from marathon danceathons and a rigged Charleston contest—the owners swap her to a roadhouse syndicate for a crate of bootleg rye. Cue a bruised odyssey through back-alley speakeasies, riverfront flophouses, and a shuttered church where moonlight pools like spilled milk. Burns, pursued by a tub-thumper evangelist who sees salvation in tap shoes, finally confronts the syndicate during a deranged gala masquerading as a dance marathon. The finale is no rhapsodic embrace but a slow blackout: Burns collapses mid-shimmy, Ralston cradles his sweat-soaked head, the band loops a waltz that sounds like a lullaby for the damned. Curtains fall on a single silver tap shoe spinning on the boards—an epilogue scrawled in scuffed leather.