Our Elders criticize many things about us, but usually they attribute to us sins too gaudy to be true. The trouble is that our Elders are a trifle gullible; they have swallowed too much of Mr. Scott Fitzgerald and Miss Gertrude Atherton. They believe all the back-stairs gossip that is written about us. We do not mind when they load the Seven Deadly Sins on our backs, but we object when they claim that we invented them. As long as their platform is a moral one, it is hardly objectionable. Perhaps we are secretly flattered at being considered picturesquely depraved. The same moral accusations have been made against all generations since the first older generation catalogued sin for the benefit of its children. But the good taste of a generation is the individual expression of its mental fastidiousness, and we must resent a slur on the quality of our taste as too personal a criticism to be accepted lightly.
The cabaret is an institution which permits our Elders to drop into a plaintively reminiscent vein and gently deplore the present decay of society. They speak of the grandeur of the balls that used to be. They describe gay and glamorous parties. (It seems, incidentally, that these Elders of ours managed to amuse themselves very thoroughly in spite of the masses of dowagers who sat on gold chairs to observe the proceedings.) We listen sympathetically. And then it comes—the reflection on our good taste: “But, of course, you young people are bored by small parties. You’d rather go to cabarets and rub elbows with all sorts and kinds of people.”
This is a comment that is distinctly offensive. Yes, we like to go to cabarets. There is no use pointing out that there are cabarets and cabarets, from the palely innocuous Lido-Venice to the colorful and more rowdy Club Richmond. There is no use trying to defend any night club. Cabaret has its place in the elderly mind beside Bohemia and bolshevik, and other vague words that have a sinister significance and no precise definition.
But, if we can’t defend the cabaret, at least we can tell why we go there. It is not, as our Elders would have it, because we “enjoy rubbing elbows with all sorts and kinds of people.” We do not particularly like dancing shoulder to shoulder with gaudy and fat drummers. We do not like unattractive people. But, at least, in the cabaret, though we see them and are near them, we do not have to dance with them. If our Elders want to know why we go to cabarets let them go to the best of these, our present day exclusive parties, and look at the stag lines. There they will see extremely unalluring specimens.
There is the young man who is well-read in the Social Register, who talks glibly of the Racquet Club, while he prays that you won’t suspect that he lives far up on the West Side. There is the gentleman who says he comes from the South, who lives just south of New York—in Brooklyn. There is the partner who is inspired by alcohol to do a wholly original Charleston, a dance that necessarily becomes a solo, as you can’t possibly join in, and can only hope for sufficient dexterity to prevent permanent injury to your feet. There are hundreds of specimens, each poisonous in his own individual way. And there are hundreds of pale-faced youths, exactly alike, who have forced the debutante to acquire a line of patter that will apply with equal appropriateness to all the numberless, colorless young men whom she once had the misfortune to meet, and with whom, if they so choose, she must continue to dance at every party. The stag line is not a collection of which any hostess can be proud. Yet what can a poor hostess do?
It is not as simple to give a party now as it used to be. In the old days, one asked an equal number of attractive men and women, and one had a party. Now there is the cutting-in system to cope with. The vitality of the party depends on the size of the stag line. A third or so of the stags are attractive, agreeable, young men. The rest are just stags, and pretty terrible.
Let those supporters of male superiority, who think that hostesses should be able to find three and four times as many attractive young men as young women, recall a certain successful Leap Year party at the Colony Club. The men on that occasion were hand-picked, but the girls were gathered from all New York. They came in
such overwhelming proportions that they outnumbered the men four to one. And the party was a riot. It was a riot well into the morning. But neither sex can stand the strain on its attractives of four to one, and the hostesses never knew where the majority of the feminine stag line came from—they suspected the Bronx. Undoubtedly the extra young women came from the same dim corners of the town whence spring the hundreds of young men who fill the stag lines of the debutante ball rooms, and vanish between functions, no one knows where.
We go to a party and take pot luck, and the luck is four to one against us. At last, tired of fruitless struggles to remember half familiar faces, tired of vainly trying to avoid unwelcome dances, tired of crowds, we go to a cabaret. We go to cabarets because of the very fastidiousness that Our Elders find so admirable a quality. We have privacy in a cabaret. We go with people whom we find attractive. What does it matter if an unsavory Irish politician is carrying on a dull and noisy flirtation with the little blonde at the table behind us? We don’t have to listen; we are with people whose conversation we find amusing. What does it matter if the flapper and her fattish boy friend are wriggling beside us as we dance? We like our partner and the flapper likes hers, and we don’t bother each other.
Yes, we go to cabarets, but we resent the criticism of our good taste in so doing. We go because, like our Elders, we are fastidious. We go because we prefer rubbing elbows in a cabaret to dancing at an exclusive party with all sorts and kinds of people. ♦
