Illustration Friday – DANCE

I haven’t participated in a while but my sister in Hong Kong sent me an anecdote this week that put a picture in my mind that fitted this week’s topic.

This is what she wrote

I was on the way to the MTR and spotted a small old fashioned Chinese grocery shop. No airconditioning, just a sleepy ceiling fan. The shelves were stacked to the ceiling with polished jars of fermented beancurd with chillies, bottles of soy sauce and jars of dried fungus. These kinds of shops are a dying breed in HK. They also sold spices and I am out of cumin so I went in to poke around and see if they had it. I needed to poke around as the shop was run by an elderly couple who spoke no English – needless to say my Cantonese does not run to ‘cumin’. Anyway, I found some cumin seeds and asked them to measure some out for me. By this time they were confused and not sure that this ‘Gweipor’ wanted it. An elderly woman customer came in to buy her fermented beancurd. She helpfully translated for me and was extolling the virtues of fermented bean curd in chillie sauce. I declined to buy as that stuff makes rotten stilton smell like lily of the valley. Anyway, as I left she told me she had to rush off to her can-can class for the elderly at Causeway bay Community centre! I told her that in Paris at the turn of the last century what made the dance so scandalous was that the ladies had splits in their bloomers. She assured me that her underwear was intact. Off she trooped to her can-can class and off I wentto work.

There are bonuses to ageing.