Goils, Goils, Goils
Savoring the Jack Amster living-vaudeville experience
One blond accepts his challenge, while the rest of the women offer giggles and throaty encouragement. The couple takes to the floor, the only ones dancing.
Clearly, Amster's lindy-hopping days are over, and he reverts to a strange kind of Adam West-
inspired "Batusi" — gesturing with fingers that make LSD trails from his face to the eyes of his partner, as though he's trying to hypnotize her.
"Go, Jack, go!" the women at the table cheer, obviously no strangers to Mr. Amster's charms.
"I'm very popular as a dancer," Amster tells me when he returns, rearranging his hair. "I never took a lesson, but I went to the 1939 World's Fair when swing was a big thing, and I developed a love of dancing. Once, at a place called Peppermint West between Cahuenga and Vine, there was a girl with Jimmy Durante who was looking at me. I danced with her twice. She was very beautiful, but I could tell she was troubled — she was Rita Hayworth."
These days, says Amster, "Men come over to me and say, 'My girlfriend wants to dance with you.' I swear on my mother, who I really love, I'm not lying or exaggerating."
At the end of his night out, Jack Amster is pleased.
"I'm known in most of the Hollywood nightclubs right now," he declares. "I'm on all their guest lists. No one at my age in Hollywood dances like I do. No one.
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