Quotes from Christine Wiltz

The tango, by 1914, had been officially declared immoral, and dancers went through its showy steps under threat of being dragged off the floor to jail unless light was visible between the partners and they refrained from doing any demoralizing dance steps, like "snake-wiggling" at the shoulders.

Norma Wallace stood on a bed of pine needles deep in the Mississippi woods

Norma, 1930s. "Whores make good wives, but madams don't. When you're making money in a whorehouse, that makes you independent and hard to get along with as a wife in the first place.

Virtue consists not in abstaining from vice, but in not desiring it." She

Her voice was deep and raspy, though not the whiskey voice given to madams in the movies. She had a trace of an accent, not Southern but New Orleans, that slow way of talking associated with downtown, an accent that sounds like Manhattan in a tropical heat wave.