DRINKING AT DANCES.

Evening Star, Issue 21503, 30 August 1933, Page 1

DRINKING AT DANCES.

TO ' THE EDITOR.

Sir,—The subject of liquor consumption at dances has once again cropped up in your correspondence columns, but one point of view in connection therewith seems to have been overlooked—viz., the fact that the drinking of intoxicants during such functions is a practice which (both in England and elsewhere) has developed contemporaneously with the substitution of modern instrumental noises for the graceful music that once re-echoed through the world’s dance halls. In the old days good manners and good music went hand in hand; even the wildest nightmares had as yet failed to conjure up visions of the horrors to be, for jazz was then mercifully hidden in the mists of futurity, and mankind gambolled gratefully to the terpsichorean strains of Arzyn melody makers. The abuse of intoxicants at dances proves conclusively to mv mind, at least, the debasing tendency of the prevailing instr ii pi oiital acwjrapanimentr—not, by any stretch of imagination can'it he' termed music. . . ..

There exists the possible alternative that some sensitive natures require a substantially alcoholic stimulant to carry them through the ordeal of several hours of perpetual ear-assault — on the same principle that dictates the employment of anaesthesia during other painful operations. If this latter assumption be correct, then I respectfully submit, sir, it would savour of cruelty to animals to deprive dance participants of ready access to such means of beneficent emancipation. Booze and jazz are correlative. —I am, etc., L.D.A. August 28.