A few nights ago I watched Silk Stockings, a musical set in Paris. It stars Fred Astaire as a movie maker and bon vivant, and Cyd Charisse as a Russian commissaire sent to Paris to bring home a famous Russian composer whom Astaire has hired to write the score for his new movie. The main subplot of the movie is how Charisse is transformed from a stern Communist who cares more about seeing Paris’s sewer system than Cartier to Astaire’s champagne-drinking, couture-wearing bride.

In my favorite scene, Charisse is alone in her Parisian hotel room. She cancels a meeting, turns Lenin’s photo face down, hesitates, and then pulls out a pair of silk stockings she had hidden in a cabinet. She yanks off her Soviet woolen tights, wafts the silk stockings against her bare legs, then dances (so, so fabulously) through the room…

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