The Headless Dancing Beauty

               Southorn Playground 1950

                        By Bill Yim

"Come on in, ladies and gentlemen! Check out the one and only Headless Dancing Beauty!"

A man in a tattered Chinese jacket, his right hand beating a gong from time to time, told a crowd of curious on-lookers with a homemade loudhailer in front of a make-shift magic theater.

The place was Southorn Playground, in Wanchai 1950, when the public square was a primitive sandy sports ground during the day and a popular and exciting night spot for local residents in the evening.

The Headless Dancing Beauty was the main feature of the magic show that week. I was then 14 years old and I was there. The following account was inspired by the brief records in the diary I kept in those days.

Wearing a red Chinese dress she danced on top of a wooden table, swaying to a piece of Hawaiian music from a 78 RPM record played on an old fashioned RCA Victor gramophone next to her.

Nobody seemed to know how she was made to appear headless. But they all got excited and roared in approval as she turned around from time to time, gently wiggling her backside in front of them.

There were approximately 20 spectators, mostly hot blooded young men, watching the show which lasted for about 10 minutes, when we all had to leave to make room for another crowd.

To me, the most entertaining and the funniest part of her act came when she bent forward to give a headless bow at the end of her dance amid a standing ovation from the audience. (There were no chairs.)

She then gingerly jumped off the table and gracefully wiggled her way to the backstage behind a black curtain. Headlessly.

I still have no idea how she managed to hide her head so neatly but, looking back,  her every move was so beautifully enticing it still makes me wonder if the head really mattered at all.

While collecting material for this article the other day, I asked a friend if he would take a sexy headless woman for a wife, one who can't argue or complain.

"Sure," he replied, "only I wouldn't want to be her guide dog every time I take her out."

I must say the 30-cent admission fee to the fantastic, albeit too short, performance was certainly worth it. 

Thirty Hong Kong cents was enough to buy a large bowl of noodles with meat balls in those days, when the average monthly income was way less than HK$100.

Television had never even been heard of by most people in Hong Kong. The only entertainment for people was a visit to the Southorn Playground night market in pyjamas, a popular evening casual wear in those days, if they were sick of playing mah jong or tired of having fights with their in-laws.

Apart from the "magic theater" there were also fortune tellers who would advise whether you should shave off your eyebrows or keep your toe nails growing for better luck.

Professional storytellers were always there entertaining listeners with their fascinating Chinese tales, such as the Naughty Monkey King or the Evil White Snake Woman. 

Of course there were also feng shui experts who could explain why their customers always felt dizzy waking up in the morning - because they had left their slippers on the wrong side of the bed or their toilets were facing the wrong direction.

Cheap cooked food stalls selling delicious clams in black bean sauce and wonton noodle soups were handy for people, especially those who had just been told by a fortune teller nearby: "You'll be hungry in five minutes."

The playground was not as lit up as what it is today. Vendors either had to carry their own oil lamps or pressure lamps for lighting or pay to use one from the rent-a-lamp services there.

Genuine traditional Chinese doctors (as well as genuine quacks) were everywhere. Their usual way to attract a crowd of would-be customers was to put on a powerful and dangerous kung fu demonstration before they started talking about their homemade cure-all ointments and plasters.

One of them was a snake catcher who made and sold wine with snake penises for aphrodisiac.

I don't have a record of his name, but I vividly remember he was always surrounded by on-lookers every night as soon as he arrived at his regular spot under a tree with a bagful of live snakes and a rattan case of his sex wine.

"Brothers and sisters. Friends and neighbors. Me, the King of Snakes is here again tonight," was his usual self-introduction to a crowd of about 30 people, mostly middle-aged men and teenagers.

Eager to find out what the King was going to do with his dangerous serpents, on-lookers would start moving closer to him, so close the King himself began to get a little annoyed because his "stage" was becoming too small for his performance.

"Please move back a little and leave me and my snakes with some space," he would tell the curious crowd as he reached into the bag, fished out a handful of hissing serpents and suddenly, without warning at all, pushed them towards the crowd.

Horrified that they might get bitten, the crowd stepped back immediately, some screaming, others laughing.

"Thank you brothers and sisters. Friends and neighbors," he bowed and thanked the crowd for their cooperation as he swung the three snakes round his neck and started talking about the wonder of his home-made aphrodisiac wine.

Quoting Confucius' famous saying "Seeic sic sing ya" or "Loving food and sex is human nature," he said men must replenish their “strength” if they want to stay as virile as a snake.

"Drinking a small glass of my snake penis wine before going to bed every night," he suggested conspiratorially, "is the answer." 

By now on-lookers, still not having seen anything exciting, were getting a little bored with his sales talk…and the King noticed that too. 

Worried that his would-be customers might walk away from him, he decided to illustrate the power of his product and the meaning of virility in a more dramatic manner.

This was what he did:

With the three snakes still hanging round his neck, he overtly zipped down his trousers and, with a flourish, surprisingly pulled out an angry king cobra hidden in a secret pocket between his legs.          

"Check this out!" he told the crowd as he grabbed the snake by the neck with one hand and ran the other hand down to the very spot where the penis was located. "This is where the energy comes from. This is what I use for making my magic wine and I use hundreds of them," he declared.

The crowd was so flabbergasted they decided to stay on as the man forcefully stuffed the snake back into its miserable secret hide-out between his legs and proudly zipped up his trousers again. 

I feel sorry for the poor king cobra which was exposed to fresh air for no more than five minutes. But the evening ended happily for everyone with the Snake King successfully making quite a few sales of his sex wine to men who agreed with Confucius that "Loving food and sex is human nature."

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 Bill Yim, the writer, is also a party caricaturist specialising in entertaining guests at corporate and private functions in Hong Kong and overseas. For a glimpse of his performance, please click on the following link:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=OpBmvuAU37g

or email: bycartoon@yahoo.com.hk

for more information.