Story of a Flapper

 Once upon a time, I did my best to update this blog once a week, and I felt bad if I didn't.  But depression, then school, etc overwhelmed any desire to write anything.  Right now, I'm in a place where I have the time, and I'm not curled up in bed staring into nothingness and wishing for same.  So, now... what do I write? 

A week from today (as I write this), I take my oral comprehensive exam.  A lot is at stake here, as I wrote last entry.  Do I stay or do I go?  Stay tuned.

I started reading a book called Flapper: A Madcap Story of Sex, Style, Celebrity, and the Women who made America Modern by Joshua Zeitz.  The prohibition era fascinates me, and I'll get to why.  Maybe because it was a time of incredible change in this country.  For the first time, the US took away citizen's rights instead of granting them (like the supreme court did recently.)  As most people know who've been on the planet a while, the unintended side effect was that organized crime became entrenched here in the US, while a majority of the populace gave the law the finger and drank anyway.  

I've read several books on the topic already, but none were female-centric.  In this case, the book centers on several women and how they smashed the Victorian sensibilities of their parents and changed how women defined themselves and society.  One of the women profiled is Lois Long, better known as "Lipstick" who wrote a column for the New Yorker.  I read about her in other books as well- through her writing, readers rode along on her adventures club hopping to all the right places.  For me, the best part was that no one knew who Lipstick was, and she took pains to keep it that way.  She reveled in her anonymity (although many women claimed to be her to gain entrance to exclusive speakeasies.)  Her prose, if you can find it, pops with energy.  Lois Long lived to be 72, passing in 1974.  She's buried in Easton, PA, not too far from where True Colors Makeup Artistry used to be.  

Lois Long (on the right)

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lois_Long)

This leads to a story (you knew it would, right?)  In the summer of 1984, I quit Burger King, worked briefly for a sewage plant, then got a summer job at Montgomery County Geriatric and Rehabilitation Center (it has since changed its name so many times, I have no idea what it's called) doing Summer Maintenance.  Usually that meant painting things, though I also learned how to do locksmithing.  One day, I was taking down air vents in the resident rooms when I met "Beatrice." I won't give her real name.  Bea was wheelchair bound after a stroke, but she wasn't going to let that stop her.  Bea ("don't call me Beatrice, young man, you're not my father!")  Bea was stuck into the home by her nephew, as her son died in Korea in 1952 (if memory serves.)  No one ever visited her as she really had no family.

Bea  loved to talk, and was a dynamo of energy.  I spent more time taking down that vent then I should have (and caught hell for it) and went back at my lunch to visit some more.  Bea was a flapper, "quite a dish," and full of stories.  She was a Main Line girl, and attended Bryn Mawr College (so she says- I never verified any of her stories, nor did I want to).  She told me about the parties and the speakeasies in Wayne, PA, and Philly, of dancing until dawn then going with her date to a diner for coffee.  She loved telling her stories, and brought the era to life in a unique way.  She told me of a "juice joint" being raided and her getting stuck in a window with her butt hanging out.  As a flapper, her skirt was quite short, and, well, she'd neglected to wear underwear, "so the police got quite a view!"  She managed to escape with a little help so her name didn't end up in the newspapers (the embarrassment!).  

Another favorite story was her "cake eater" (ladies man) of the moment trying to teach her to drive, and running his brand new Stutz into a ditch, which tossed them out over the windshield into a creek (she showed me a scar on her arm, which she claims was from that accident), shredding her "glad rags."  He didn't ask her out again after that.  Bea married "a mouthpiece from Yale" (lawyer) with whom she had her son.  She had her son's medals and showed them to me.   Her husband died in the 60s, so she'd lived alone since.  

1925 Stutz model 695

(https://www.conceptcarz.com/valuation/17247/stutz-model-695.aspx)

That fall, I went to Drexel.  When I came home for Thanksgiving break, I learned that Bea had another stroke, and that this one took her at age 83.  I attended her funeral, where I was one of maybe ten people.  She had no one left.  I had a writing assignment after break, so I wrote about Bea.  The professor liked it so much, she entered it in a contest, where it won an award.  I guess standards for writing at an engineering school were low.  

I wonder what she would think of my transition.  She wasn't exactly conservative (she considered Reagan a "flimflam artist").  I'm guessing she would've encouraged me to hike up my skirt to show off my "pins" and enjoy myself.  And then smiled that sly smile she had.  

I think of Bea once in a while, and the life she had.  We are all people of our time: she of the Roaring Twenties and myself of the Eighties and Nineties (that's when I was free to "gad about.")  I assume that all the flappers are gone now, so there is no living memory of that time.  Eventually, there will be no living memory of World War II, then the Sixties, and, someday, the Eighties.  Maybe that's why I tell stories now (like in this blog) so someone, somewhere may read them and learn a little about my time (and yours).  

Be well, and "don't take any wooden nickels."