1922

As long as I have to stay in the house anyway I may as well write, right?
Stupid rain.

For some reason my imagination has always been attracted by the image I have of what the 1920's must have been like. America was still largely rural, but the economy was booming, the cities were lively and growing and nobody had a hint of the coming Crash. The clothes, the architecture, the intellectual movements, the modern art, everything about it draws me.
I would have made a great farm wife...and I would have made an excellent flapper too. Isadora Duncan? Please. I would have done her pale.
I remember reading one of my mothers books years ago....the title was 'Flaming Youth'. And it was about young, devil-may-care children of wealth coming of age in the 20's, all gin and sin and fast cars and the Charleston. Now I remember it as being a cautionary tale, but I stopped kind of short of the caution and just dreamed on the cars and the men and the music, the cocaine and the rolled stockings and the Deusenbergs filled with slim laughing women.
I love to picture the southern women of the era in their beads and feathers. I think of them gossiping and blotting their lips on their hems as they repair their Tangee Red in round mirrors and take lights off each others cigarettes, or knocking back white lightening out of mason jars at some house party waaaay back in the woods...so far back they have to pipe in sunlight, smoking hot country blues falling out of the windows. And I wish, I wish I could have been there.
Early radio, the crooners singing over the static coming through the wooden horn of your Stereola...78 records played at the drop of the needle on the black shine and that anticipation of crackles right before the music soars out...damn.
I was able to hear some faint echoes of this era when I was a child and the grown-ups around me would reminisce, or show me the contents of their closets and boxed memories. My grandmother had a collection of boy-chested dancing dresses from her own flaming youth, covered in long golden moonbeam trumpet beads. Imagine all that swinging around in a room full of saxophones, whirling around the center circle of a laughing woman taller than all the rest in the room.
It would have been amazing to be in on the eve of radio, speaking to strangers from continent to continent and hearing the voices of strangers come back. Back then, s.o.s was CQD. My father was a little boy with a crystal set he'd made himself, listening to the catastrophes and the announcements of strangers abroad in languages he'd never imagined.
One friend down the block had a brother interested in ham radio and in the small hours, in the middle of winter, sometimes he would catch a reflection straight out of time. From the darkness of space, in the middle of the night, amidst all the Bakelite knobs and indicators, old broadcasts first issued live from the Sky Rooms or Music Halls of some long forgotten nightspot in Chicago or New York returned to replay in full. I can't think of this without feeling some kind of mystery come over me. All those happy people, dancing and applauding, the musicians all a little nervous because this was a live broadcast, captured on a wavelength and by some chance of meteorology or orbit going out and returning from some hard place deep in space all those years later. And the lone man listening in the night, in the silence of his makeshift radio room, to...'it is nine 45 in the evening, friends, and this is a live broadcast from the Starlight Ballroom, coming to you from Cincinnati Ohio. My name is Charles Sinclair, the date, November 23, 1922.'

Damn. November 23, 1922.