Free My Ears Are Bent by Joseph Mitchell

celebrated legs.
    She rubbed her drowsy blue eyes. Then she scratched her back, grunted with satisfaction, and remarked that the make-up she applies to various sections of her body sometimes makes her itch. She said, “Doesn’t it feel good to scratch?” It was very warm in the dressing room, and so she pulled the legs of her filmy pajamas up to her pink, dimpled knees, wriggled her painted toes and said, “I like to be as naked as possible.”
    “Only,” she said, “I’m against organized nudism. I think those nudist people are selling the public a bill of goods that they are foolish to pay for. It shouldn’t cost anybody anything to go naked. There was a nudistcult out on the West Coast, and their lawyer came around and offered me a big sum to go out there and endorse it. Did I give him a tongue-lashing? I ask you.”
    “Are you afraid of competition from the nudists?” she was asked.
    “Oh, no,” she said. “It’s nothing commercial. The offer shocked me. I knew that if I endorsed it a lot of fat old men would join the cult just to see me without fans. It made me sick, to think that my lovely dance should be confused with such things! Those nudists told me that your moral fiber is made stronger if you go naked, but all the nudists I saw had scratches all over their rear ends where they had been sitting down on thorns.”
    She pushed her hands through her blond curls. Her Japanese maid, Stella Sato, a jovial, bespectacled Oriental, pattered in and began to shake out Miss Rand’s ostrich fans.
    “How do you feel, Stella?” asked Miss Rand.
    “O.K.,” said Miss Sato.
    “The reason I asked her that,” said Miss Rand, “is because we just made the longest overnight theatrical jump on record. Last night at 9:30 I ran off the stage of the Paramount Theatre in Omaha, Nebraska, and jumped into a pair of woolen pajamas. Then we drove to the airport, got into a United Airline plane, and rode all night. I was in time for the first show here in Brooklyn.
    “I complicated things at Omaha because one of my admirers gave me a fat little suckling pig with a red ribbon around his neck. I put it in a shoe-box and punched some holes in it so he could breathe. The airline won’t let you take pets. When I got in the plane the pig squealed on me, and I had to leave it behind. You never heard such squealing. Such a pretty little pig!”
    Miss Rand has a new explanation for her dance, a dance in which she strides across the stage weaving a pair of fans in front of her.
    “It is just my interpretation of a white bird flying in the moonlight at dusk,” said the dancer, speaking huskily as if reciting a love poem. “A white bird, flying. It flies up into the moonlight. It is dusk. It flies low. It flutters. Then it begins to climb into the moonlight. Finally, it rests.”
    Miss Rand, who looks as if she could take the prize as the Healthiest Girl in America, breathed ecstatically. She said that the music for her dance is called “The Birth of Passion.” She left her fans at the hotel this morning, but Lawrence Sittenberg, a fan manufacturer, arrived with a new pair just in time for the show.
    She picked up one of the fans, laid it on her lap and caressed it. She did not get much sleep on the airplane, and her eyes were drowsy.
    “I could just stretch out and sleep forever,” shesaid, ruffling the fan. “I have been having such a good time. I bought my mother an orange grove near Los Angeles, and I gave her a tractor for a birthday present. Her name is Annette Kisling. My real name is Helen Beck, and I was born in Hickory County, Missouri. My mother has been married twice. We grow the best apples in the world in Hickory County.
    “I understand they have a new license commissioner here in town, and I hope he keeps his pants on. The other one said I was obscene. Personally, I think my dance is as lovely as anything in the world, and I would run from anybody low enough to see anything obscene in it.”
    The Japanese girl