Music for a Sideshow

 

 A tiny micro story

teased out of a photo postcard.

 

 

  "Can you see anything, TJ? What's goin' on?" said Archie as he knelt down.

 

   "Shush up! Keep quiet." hissed Tom. "You'll get yer turn." He fiddled with the canvas to pull a bit more away from the tent's seam. "Wish I had my paw's Barlow. You gotta knife on ya, Arch?"

 

   Archie rolled over and reached into a pocket of his overalls. "Just this old pen blade. I just use it to pick  my teeth so it ain't very sharp." He handed it to Tom.

   "Maybe it'll do to cut these stitches." Tom sawed at the threads and opened up more of the torn canvas. He wriggled closer to the tent wall and peeped through the gap.  

 

   "Looks like they're gonna take a photo," Tom whispered. "I can see Mr. Wachtel from the drugstore setting up his camera. Here you take a look." 

 

   Archie shifted his bulk over to the rip in the tent wall. "I can't get my specs close enough to see thru." 

   "Then take 'em off!"

    "But then I won't see nothing," whined Archie. He put just one eye up to the hole. "I think I can see some lady in dark stockings moving around. I sure wish we could get a peek at them hootee-kootee dancers."   

 

 "Hoochee-coochee, ya dummy," grumbled Tom. "You wouldn't wanta meet the kootee kind." He shoved the other boy aside and looked through the canvas. "Psst! I think what you saw was a trombone. There's a brass band setting up an' Mr. Wachtel is pointing at 'em to get onta stand outside the show tent. That bass drummer looks like the same fella we saw wrangling everybody over at the ring toss game. He seemed like an awful sharp cheat." 

 

 

    "What's a oh-ree-intal dancer anyway," asked Archie. "Those pictures on the tent don't look like any lady I ever seen. And that one laying down sipping from a jug looked real odd."

 

   Tom sighed. "That's cause they're not from America but from far off Araby. They dress different there cause it's so hot, I suppose. And that woman wasn't drinkin' , she was smokin' Turkish tobbacky in a pipe." He gave his friend a poke. "Hush now. There's girls stepping up to a table on the other side." 

 

    "I bet they're something else," chirped Archie. "I wish we had a couple of quarters to go in, but all I got is a dime and six pennies."

 

   Tom gave a snort. "They're something else all right. The most skin I can see is an elbow, an' one gal looks older than my Aunt Lou. I don't think none of 'em ever danced for no Sultan of Bagdad." 

   Suddenly the two boys were jerked up by their braces and spun around to face a huge man dressed in a tight blue leotard. Clenching a shoulder in each hand he hoisted them up so they were standing on their toes. 

 

 

 

   The giant thrust his enormous head so close to their ashen faces that they could feel the bristle of his mustache and smell the sour odor of his breath. "Yous in mine tent. Whys you in Klaus' tent?" he growled. "I tink yous like the pretty ladies, yah?" He tightened his grip. "Maybe yous wanna join the circus. Yous got any tricks?" The boys shook their heads vigorously. "No? Maybe yous wanna try win prize inna ring rassling with big Klaus. Tink yous mens strong nuff to beat Klaus?" The boys' eyes widened. His grin did not seem very friendly. 

   With a laugh he dropped them to the ground. "Yah, dass what I tink. Yous boys git now. Run home to mama." As Archie and Tom scrambled out of the tent, the giant called after them. "Maybe next time Klaus shows yous how to dance the cootchee  goot!" 

 

 

 

 * * *

 

 

 

This postcard photo of a small brass band and three "Oriental" dancers posing outside the entrance to a carnival or circus sideshow tent is unmarked and without date. The "Interesting and Amuseing (sic) Dancing Girls" are dressed in vaguely exotic costumes that suggest, but actually don't reveal much uncovered skin. We can recognize the dancer's hook because it's the same seductive lure used since ancient times when the idea of paid entertainment was first invented. Despite the tent show's claim of "The Dance of Art", this was not a performance of sophisticated ballet, but was instead a cheap burlesque act to skim the pockets of country rubes. 

 

My guess is that the photo was taken around 1905-1915, an era when traveling tent shows like this were America's most common form of entertainment. The nation was then more rural than urban, and distance was measured by train timetables. Every day hundreds of circuses, carnivals, minstrel shows, wild west companies, and dramatic troupes were constantly on the move, dismantling their tents in one town to reassemble in the next place on the rail line. Every show, even one with exotic oriental dancers, needed a band. It didn't necessarily require a big band, or even one with talent, but at the very least it had to be a noisy one to grab the patrons' attention.  

The Streets of Cairo
or the Poor Little Country Maid,
song written and composed by James Thornton, 1895
Source: Wikipedia

The hoochie-coochie, or hootchy-kootchy as it is sometimes spelled, was an early burlesque dance that borrowed the sexually provocative belly dance style of Middle-Eastern or Eastern European Gypsy women. The music associated with this dance is a minor key jingle called "the snake charmer song" or Arabian riff, and was also known as "The Streets of Cairo" by James Thorton, published in 1895.

 

In 1893 the city of Chicago hosted the Columbian Exposition to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus' arrival in the New World. One of the attractions at this enormous World's Fair was a so-called Egyptian Theater at the fair's Midway which included dancers performing traditional Arabic belly dancing. The show was titled "The Algerian Dancers of Morocco" at the attraction called "A Street in Cairo". One of the dancers was a woman named Farida Mazar Spyropoulos who went by the stage name of Fatima, though she was neither Egyptian nor Algerian, but actually Syrian and married to a Chicago restaurateur who was a native of Greece. Because of the theater's name and Fatima's size, she earned a nickname at the fair as "Little Egypt".  

 

During the short run of the fair from May 1 to October 30, 1893, "Little Egypt's" exotic dance became a popular attraction and was often referred to as the "Hoochee-Coochee", or a "shimmy and shake" dance, as the word "bellydance" had not yet become part of American vocabulary. The music used to accompany her dance became a worldwide cliche tune known as the Snake Charmer song. I can attest that children in 2021 still regularly request oboe players to play this melody.

Three years later, James H. White, a Canadian-American filmmaker and one of the pioneers of early cinema, made a moving picture short for the Edison Manufacturing Company of "Little Egypt" recreating her dance from the 1893 Chicago World's Fair. Despite being only 30 seconds long and without sound, the short became incredibly popular at amusement parks and boardwalk arcades around the world. In later years it was subject to censorship and bars were painted on the film to obscure the supposedly naughty bits. YouTube provides a double feature to see both the original and the censored version of Fatima's Coochee Coochee Dance (1896)

 

 

 

 

After Fatima, aka "Little Egypt", achieved some notoriety with her exotic dance, other women stepped forward with their own "Oriental dance".  In 1904 a woman named "Princess Rajah" earned a name for herself with a dance that she performed in the "Mysterious Asia" concession at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis. She got her start as a "cooch" dancer at Coney Island in the 1890s. This next short film of Princess Rajah's unusual belly dance style was shot on location at the St. Louis Exposition in May 1904 for the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company. She uses a prop in a surprising way that authentic Egyptian dancers would probably consider as absurdly dangerous. In later years she added a snake to her performance.

 

 

 

Sideshow exotic dancers were once a very common part of carnival entertainment, familiar to that part of the American public who understood the salacious hook. Nudge, nudge. Know what I mean?

But the thing about entertainment cliches, or memes in modern parlance, is that eventually even children learn about them. In 1929 Walt Disney made a short cartoon animation called The Karnival Kid. It was the ninth cartoon to feature Mickey Mouse, and the first one which let him speak. The story is set in a carnival where Minnie Mouse appears as a "Shimmy Dancer." 

 

 

It's important to note that the voice of Mickey (and the cats too), came from Carl W. Stalling (1891–1972), the composer of the cartoon's music. (Walt Disney voiced Minnie) Stalling came to Hollywood by way of his friendship with Walt, but his tenure at the Disney Studios was short. He is more closely associated with the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies cartoons produced by Warner Bros. Under his IMDB entry, Carl Stalling earned 774 credits as a composer during his long career. 

 

 

 

The previous short films are, of course, parodies of a traditional Middle-Eastern dance form. Here is an example of the real thing, with celebrated Egyptian dancer Nabaweya Moustafa (1919–2001) performing in a scene from the 1948 Egyptian film "Narges". The word Narges or Narjis is a female Arabic name that translates in English as the flower "Narcissus". Here the band and music have an authentic Arabic sound, and as far as I know, no chairs or hot dogs were harmed during Nabaweya's dance.  

 

 

 

The first belly dancers were exploiting a universal male desire to see scantily clad women perform a salacious bump and grind. Ignoring for the moment its obvious sexual nature, at its essence the "hoochie coochie dance" was, and still is, a bad imitation of misunderstood foreign culture. It shares the same kind of 19th century pigheaded insensitivity to the Arab and Middle-Eastern world just as the black-face minstrel shows did with African-American culture. It may seem like a harmless terpsichorean display but a century ago there was an underlying racist overtone to the "Oriental" dance that demeaned a number of national and ethnic cultures. Just the very word "Oriental" implies a myriad of offensive notions of imperialism, colonialism and white superiority over the rest of the world's people that does not resonate well in the 21st century.

Yet it's strange that somehow,

whenever you hear the first five notes

of the snake charmer song,

you can't help but think of dancers like these.

 

 

This is my contribution to Sepia Saturday
a picture show that's always showing reruns.