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The dance marathons - Irish-American Literature
MELUS, Spring, 1993 by James T. Farrell
Also every contestant has a specialty which he or she puts on for the audience, or over the radio. One young man chews razor blades, and as far as I can ascertain, he grinds them into a fine dust, and swallows them. Singing and tap-dancing are favorite specialties. This suggests that the marathon is frequently used as a stepping stone, or a desired stepping stone, to vaudeville.
The singing and tap-dancing is usually pretty bad, inartistic, clumsy, stupid. The songs are popular songs; the tap-dancers emphasize tricks, feats, novelties, rather than pattern, organization, or rhythm, movement and gestures, and are obviously superficial. Sometimes the contestants present blackouts, or crudely thought up playlets. It is obvious that the contestants are persons of sluggish imagination, and coffined intelligence, and their playlets and blackouts are of a corresponding character and quality. They are mainly of a sexual nature, and are frequently gray-haired dirty jokes. I have heard some of these several years back in the ten cent burlesque shows on South State Street, Chicago. These specialties are presented to make money. The audience usually tosses in pennies, nickels, and dimes, and this gives many of the performers an income of four or five dollars a day. I have heard indirectly from an official at White City that one couple in the super-marathon earn forty a day in this fashion. (I shall mention this aspect of marathons later on in these notes.) One ingenious young marathoner in a contest at the Pershing Ballroom, Chicago, conceived the idea of a penny hour club, and during a certain hour the audience was asked to throw in all the pennies it had. They gave playlets during the penny hour, and had a sliding scale of prices for each. Before one of their repertory was presented, from twenty-five to fifty cents were demanded, and usually... received. This penny hour netted the marathoners (there were six at the time) five to six dollars. There are other bits of grotesque comedy. Marathoners fall down and get black eyes, they fight, especialy in the dead early hours of the morning, when they curse each other out. At White City there is one tall, stupid looking fellow who, because of some organic difficulty, cannot sleep bending over. He is thus chained to his partner, and she walks around reading a newspaper, while he, having learned to sleep on his feet, is jerked comically and staggeringly after her. It is also interesting to note that the girls undergo a striking change of figure. They gradually swell and fatten around the hips and buttocks, frequently losing their figure. There are at White City now several girls who were small, and even trim of figure, and who are now swollen out like balloons. An explanation of this, however, should be asked from a doctor, and I would not attempt to suggest my notion of the cause here. Another grotesquely comical feature of the dance marathon as a spectacle is the efforts made to awaken the contestants. Various means are tried. They are shoved and pushed. They are slapped with wet towels, shaken, jerked. At the Pershing Ballroom there was a strap attached to a dynamo, and the contestants had this strap attached to them, and electricity was used to awaken them. Also at the Pershing Ballroom, a favorite trick was to stick a finger down the throat of the sleeping contestant. For a while at this contest, the contestants' cots were on the dance floor, and they would sleep their five minute rest periods in pubhc. One trick of awakening them then was to put their shoes on the wrong feet. Also at the Pershing contest, a pure air outfit was rigged up in which the contestants slept. White stalls were built about the cots, and pure air was steamed into these, creating a smell that was like onions and cabbage soup dumped into a Turkish bath establishment. Much was claimed for this, the contention being that because of the purity of the oxygen, the contestants could secure as much rest in five minutes, as they would otherwise in impure air, in fifteen minutes. The contestants read, write letters, and josh about on the floor. Sometimes there is comedy and fighting when someone tries to read someone else's letters. Once a judge stole the love-letter of a tough Polish contestant, and she threw everything she could find at him. He shoved her around, insisting, "What's the matter with chuh? I ain't got sore at yuh before in the hull contest. What's eatin' yuh? Huh?
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