Thais

     Written by Newman Levy and published in his Opera Guyed (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, c. 1923, renewed 1951), this redaction of the Massenet opera of the same name also saw print in the underground publication Immortalia in 1927, pp. 19-20.  It is included too in the 1968 reprint, p. 128.  
     The passage of writer-attorney Levy's poem into oral tradition is not so easily traced.  The tune, if any, to which Levy intended his poem to be sung is nowhere indicated.  The unique version of the song, with minor changes wrought in Levy's original, was sung to the editor by Phyllis Zasloff in Los Angeles, about 1955.  Her melody is a variant of "Son of a Gambolier."

One time in Alexandria, wicked Alexandria,
The night life was exciting in that city by the Nile,
There lived, historians report, the pride of Nile's famed
	resort,
The pride of Pharoah's noble court, and Thais was her name.