These sentences are out of context and free-floating, yet they all share a common subject, a topic that has inspired Broadway bards for generations: female gams. The legs of a lady. The sweet distance from waist to toe. The limb that is poetic and heroic.

Okay, batter up:

1) Her legs were somewhere between nine and twelve miles long.

2) Her thighs were implacable, ineluctable, inexplicable, yet whenever they spoke, they spoke softly.

3) With a stride like that, it was if she was followed at every turn by a three-man Afro-Cuban jazz band – coronet, piccolo, finger-cymbals – who beat out a voodoo rhythm, ephemeral but timeless, slithery but strident, and always, always, filled with the sublime religiosity of a cool summer evening.

(That last one might have lost control, but that’s a common occurrence in the literature of the gam…)