A Question Of Context?

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