CRYSTAL DANCE FLOORS

Shannon News, 1 April 1926, Page 2

CRYSTAL DANCE FLOORS

BRILLIANT AND DELUSIVE “How too wonderful!” breathed the girl as we came under the amber lights shimmering- on a crystal dance floor. The crystal dance floor itself shimmered with marvelous lighjt. When you reached your little supper table, so dainty, so bewitching- with its gleam of silver and cut-glass and scent of fresh-cut flowers, you saw that the magical effect was achieved by lights on the underside of the glass floor. A simple engineering feat, but remarkable effective. As for me, I politely acquiessced in my companion’s enthusiasm.. One does not cynically damp the spirits of a pretty girl in a breatless frock, with whom one is going to dance, writes Patrick Chalmers in the “Daily Mail.” It was in Paris, and we were dancing in a smart restaurant celebrated for its glass floor. The floor had appeared for the first time in an Argentine “dancing.” Then it had bobbed op in Biarritz, taken there by a famous dancing- man who used to partner one of the most ravishing of all dancers, but who now supports himself, an apartment, some cars and luxurious tastes, on the profits of dance resorts in the pleasure cities of Prance. That glass floor, to be brief, is for the, unsophisticated who don’t know whether they are dancing on glass, marble, oak, pine, birch or ebony; and for charming young- women who don’t care what they 'dance on so long as they see pretty frocks, have an attractive partner, and eat an attractive supper.

With the wonderful crystal ballroom floor one may rank the marble floor which one meets on the Itiviora. Both tire the feed horribly. They begin by enchanting and end ‘by irritating. ' The perfect floor has' yet to be devised. The best made so far is of ’Balkan oak, cut in segments, baked, and supported on 10,000 spiral steel springs. it is periodically adjusted and planed, but, personally, I find it too vibrant.

Another fine floor, in a famous cabaret, is so vibrant that one night I laid a bottle of champagne overturned by an evmbifion dance couple who spun too those to my table on the floor rim. An unyielding floor —the commonest type of had floor —the parti net block floor. This type‘< of floor is generally made worse by be-? ing uolished too highly. .Leg sjtrain, with consequent leg ache, results. A London dance-restaurant has what .1 consider one of the best dance floors in the world; made of selected cart;fully-seasoned pine planks, it is hung on chains and rests gently on a specially designed at. i ; t.afed system of baulks. Champagne, medical music, an alluying partner, may blind one to floor defects; but the cold fact remains that the perfect floor has yet to be invented. ,