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| Dance, Daughters, Dance! 1928 |
By the time a young
actress danced in front of a three-way mirror and on table tops, shaking her
body as her bobbed hair bobbed and her scandalously short skirt swayed up and
down, the dance known as the "Shimmy" was almost a decade old.
This was Joan Crawford in
the Academy Award nominated film, Our Dancing Daughters
(1928). Crawford epitomized the flapper-dancer-modern-woman of the Jazz era.
She may have brought the popular Shimmy dance to the (somewhat respectable)
silver screen, but she also tamed it in many ways. The Shimmy had actually
emerged a decade earlier, in the months after the end of World War I. And
it caused an uproar.