Fever on the dancefloor
QUESTION What became of the dancefloor in Saturday Night Fever?
The famous lighted plexiglass floor where John Travolta strutted his stuff was designed for the film and installed at the 2001 Odyssey, a Brooklyn nightclub.
When the club closed down in 2005, its contents were auctioned off and the floor was bought by concert promoter Vito Bruno for $6,000.
When it was sold again at the Profiles In history hollywood Auction in 2017, it went for a cool $ 1.2 million to an anonymous bidder. It has been speculated that the buyer was John Travolta.
The iconic floor was 24 ft wide and 16 ft deep. It consisted of 12 acrylic panels set into a wooden frame matrix with 250 15-watt carnival incandescent bulbs.
Cinematographer Ralf Bode chose primary colours to light up the floor in rhythm with the music.
The film was set at the height of the disco craze. Travolta played workingclass Tony Manero, who spent his weekends dancing. his solo to the Bee Gees’ You Should Be Dancing was performed in a single take and is one of the all-time great movie dance scenes.
Gerry Mansell, Boston, Lincs.
QUESTION Americans say ‘If I had my druthers’, which means having your way. What is a druther?
DRUTHERS is an American dialect term meaning I’d rather, as in I’d rather be doing something else. It is a contraction of two words to form a single slang word.
Mark Twain may have popularised it in his 1896 book, Tom Sawyer, Detective. huckleberry Finn says to Tom: ‘Anyway you druther (you’d rather) have it, that’s the way I druther (I’d rather) have it.’
however, its first use was in 1833 in The American Turf Register: ‘I druther live in the woods anytime by myself than on the best plantation in the country.’ Its modern use is to mean that if someone had been given a choice, they would have made a different decision, such as, if I’d had my druthers, I’d have gone to Spain and not France.
english is littered with such slang. Wannabe is a contraction of want to be, meaning someone who aspires to be like someone else, usually a celebrity.
Bob Dillon, Edinburgh.
QUESTION Has a cruise ship sunk immediately after it was launched?
FURTHER to the unfortunate fate of the top-heavy Principessa Jolanda, which sank on its launch in 1907, her sister ship Principessa Mafalda suffered an even more unfortunate end. She was launched on October 22, 1908, without upper decks to avoid the same fate and sailed between Genoa and Buenos Aires for the Navigazione Generale Italiana company.
On October 25, 1927, the Mafalda was headed for Rio de Janeiro from Cape Verde. Off the coast of Brazil, a propeller shaft fractured and damaged the hull. The ship sank slowly, but confusion resulted in 314 fatalities out of 971 passengers and 288 crew.
Ian Russell, Southampton.
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