_Dear Kate_:
I went down to Miner's the other night and saw Mable Lee. I was in her
dressing room with her most two hours. She is a near star now, and don't
she put on airs! She has a dressing room of her own, and any mere chorus
girl that puts her nose in her door gets a lady-like call-down that you
can hear to 42nd Street. She forgot that she ever worked at Coney with
us, and rustled beer between acts, and that ain't the only thing that
has happened to her memory. She says she is only twenty one, and she was
twenty one when we were playing together at the Casino and I was doing a
kid act. That was ten years ago. I must say it for her, she gets it over
because she has got new red hair and when she gets her face fixed up and
her long ear rings on, which is about all she wears in this new act,
she looks about sixteen.
I danced the other night at a party. There was a lot of swell folks
there, women with low neck dresses and real diamonds. Gee, if Anthony
Comstock had come in he'd a got busy when he piped off some of the
clothes. They acted as if they were trying to be tough, set around and
smoked and acted like street girls dressed up. Funny, ain't it, street
girls try to act like real ladies, and real ladies try to act like
street girls. I suppose everybody wishes sometimes they could be what
they ain't, and so they play at the other thing. I wondered as I looked
at them if they had homes or babies, and if they ever set in front of
the fire and talked of things like Mr. and Mrs. Smith does.
Sometimes Mr. Smith reads at night from a Bible and he read the other
night something written by a Jewish gentleman named Moses. I heard it
all one evening when I was dancing. It just come back to me like a soft
voice:
"As an eagle that stirreth up her nest, that fluttereth over her young.
He spread abroad his wings, he took them, he bare them on his pinions."
Now, ain't that pretty? I thought after I went to bed about the big bird
that broke up her nest, as Mr. Smith told to me, and pushed her babies
out so as they could learn to fly, and then went under them with her
wings all stretched out wide to catch them if they fell. That is just
like a mother, ain't it? They want their children to go in the world and
learn, yet they would put out their bodies if they could for them to
fall on when things went wrong. I suppose it is because children are so
helpless and their mothers must care for them and keep them from
everything that is hard and so it brings out all the love and sweetness
in a woman's heart and makes her give her life for her own. Anyway, I
heard it a humming in my heart along with the music, and I didn't dance
my dance at all, I just danced old Moses, and I will never see a kike
again with the same eyes.
I got another new dress. Gee, it is like pulling teeth to spend the
money. Will Henderson made up another dance for me, and I had to have
the clothes to go with it. He is a wonder, Kate, a sure wonder! Even
when he is half full of dope he sets down to that old piano and makes it
talk. Some times he sets for half an hour with his head in his hands,
and then he raises up and has a funny look in his eyes and plays such
music that all the crowd stops laughing and listens to him. I can dance
anything he plays, cause he makes the music talk to me. Sometimes it is
country fields and flowers and birds and running brooks, and then it
changes to dull wet nights beneath the street lamps with sad eyed girls
and bad-faced men and hungry eager people all looking for something they
have missed, and they go into cabarets like this I dance in, filled with
smoke and laughs that only come from lips not from the heart--and I
whirl and dance until I am mad from dizziness. And then the music quiets
down again and sadness comes and you know the searchers have not found
what they were looking for, and they, wander out into the dim grey light
of morning and disappear like mist upon the lake.
Oh, Kate, I love to dance! I hope I will never grow old, I want to die a
dancing.
Yours,
_Nan_.