A Question Of Context?
Posted by Ross Rosenberg
After watching this clip of the Ross Sisters’s performance from the 1944 musical Broadway Rhythm one may be forgiven for wondering just what is meant by the phrase “solid potato salad.” You may be thinking that, certainly there is some ulterior meaning here, some sort of perverse inference to be made hinting at an unspeakable taboo; an act unfit for the polite society of your grandparents but universally understood nevertheless. Surely, you might think, they cannot merely be soliloquizing a starchy side dish, no matter how good it may have been.
To this I would respond: does it matter? After watching a trio of lithe nymphets fold themselves in half, does the meaning of such an innocuous phrase still bear contemplation? At the point that a sprightly girl twists and descends like a coiled snake to pluck an apple with her mouth, is innuendo even an issue? I would maintain that, should they have chosen to, they could just as well have read the back of a cereal box and still held the audience’s attention just as effectively.
Still, it must have been one delicious salad.
Solid Potato Salad – The Ross Sisters [metacafe] : Scribal Terror
Categories: Contortionists, Gurls Gurls Gurls, Innuendo, Movies, Musicals, Nymphs
Posted at 9:51 am on July 25, 2008
11 Comments -
That video is seriously intense and freaky.
Comment by method — July 25, 2008 @ 1:14 pm
One can only surmise that “solid potato salad” is a side dish served exclusively at the devil’s potluck.
Comment by Camilla Taylor — July 25, 2008 @ 2:26 pm
So that’s what girls were like in 1940…
Comment by Matt Anderson — July 25, 2008 @ 2:39 pm
That’s some pretty crazy contortionism in that video. It’s probably for the best that they kept the singing portion to a minimum.
Comment by Mike — July 25, 2008 @ 3:31 pm
they look like they are deflating in some of the contortions
Comment by the file clerk — July 25, 2008 @ 4:29 pm
I want to build a puppet body in the shape of an alien centipede for the continuous triple-backbend sequence…
Comment by Elmo — July 25, 2008 @ 5:52 pm
I have seen this video before, but I do not recall where. Still gets me every time.
Comment by racerabbit — July 25, 2008 @ 5:54 pm
Oh my stars and garters. That is erotic and simultaneously horrifying. My nightmares will now be haunted by creepy flexible girls in pigtails.
Comment by Sean Grimm — July 25, 2008 @ 6:32 pm
They could have been singing “Sliced Baby Salad” for all I care. Thanks Ross, you did us a solid on this one.
Comment by SM — July 26, 2008 @ 5:45 pm
Those girls sure can sing!
Comment by jackdorf — July 27, 2008 @ 8:42 am
Yikes! I thought only juvenile Chinese gymnasts could do stuff like that, not nearly adult women!
Thanks for finding that.
Comment by dragonet2 — August 5, 2008 @ 11:39 am