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The Girl From Colosimo’ s
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“ ‘The Girl from Colosimo’s/ ” says I, giving it a title.
“Of course, the strangest, the most unbelievable part, is that she should be Irene O’Dare of ‘Irene/ ” And without pause she adds:
“I don’t think my five long years out there were wasted, do you?”
I answer an emphatic “no” even as memory shuffles its cards and I see her again in the atmosphere that was Colosimo’s. It is four in the morning and some of the dancers reel. Hoarse women, the paint on their mouths awry, laugh like oboes; when they speak it is to say “I’ll say it is,” or “Say, dearie.” Red-faced young men and purplish, fat-faced older men talk their secrets above the moan of the lustful saxophone. Everybody drinks with everybody else. Only the waiters appear detached, each man for him* self; but one oath too loud, one gesture that might become a blow, and these piratical minions are an organized constabulary for peace at any price. Their seldom employed bum’s rush is as pretty as football and faster. ... A stout girl with jellying neck, an employe, sits at your table and drones a “blues” above the din ; clairvoyantly the distant band blares an accompaniment. Over the way at a table where amber wine sparkles in high glasses sits a girl of arresting frank-faced beauty who but for two things might be a slummer from the north coast — she wears no hat and she is not interested. She is Dale Winter, “Jim” Colosimo’s girl. And even the wastrel optimism of the place, which holds every woman guilty till proven innocent, sets her apart, implacably straight to “Jim,” a dark, groomed, nourished man who drifts from