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Pieces of Soap “Performance and Reality”

And now it happens. Just now. The flamenco dancer is doing a particularly difficult riff. This murderous tango of a man 
 whose body is one taut line of mood, who, touched at one end of that body should, by the laws of physics if not the conventions of his 
 trade, like the strings on the musician’s guitar, vibrate at the other, but whose art it is to defy physics, to drive his feet like pistons without
ruffling a ruffle of his shirt, who does that, whose ruling second skin of costume, revealing still that inch and a half of scar, 
 the material caught in it, in the scar , the magic show-biz gypsy latex, stuck there like the long, dark vertical of a behind snagged in the pants 
of a fat man rising from a chair on a hot day, does not, does not, display a single qualm of muscle, not one quiver, tremor, shiver, flutter, 
 not one shake, not even his trousers which, snug as they are from mid-thigh to the small of the back, are cut like normal men’s beneath that and 
 actually hang like a gaucho’s in a sort of flare below the knees, not even his damn trousers jump!
Stanley Elkin