Step right up folks, lots of room at the front! Don’t push; don’t shove, don’t blink; there’s plenty to see here. Ladies and gents, welcome to your tour of the Flapper Follies experience. My name is Damon and I will be your guide, social director, and interpreter for however long our journey takes. Not to alarm you folks, but one of our groups strayed too closely to Hooch Holler and we still haven’t heard from them. As we proceed along our route today we’ll be in close contact with all sorts of shady saps and suckers. Gangsters and molls, flappers and dappers, rumrunners, moonshiners and bootleggers, however, rest assured these are the good guys.

What’s that, young man? “What’s a flapper? What’s hooch?” Well, here we have the interpreter part of my job. In the world of Flapper Follies, slang and lingo rule supreme. Just like today where cool and chill have meanings other than refrigeration, during the bloom of bootleg booze, jargon brought code words into everyday conversation. Since illegal untaxed alcoholic beverages would get you tossed in the hoosegow (thrown in jail, for those of you still lost, in the back of the crowd) you would refer to it using nicknames such as hooch, booze, juice, bathtub tea and panther sweat, just to name a few.

Flappers were young modern women daring to break out of the mold the world had set for them. These gutsy girls gained ground on the notion that women should accomplish much more than they’d been allowed to do in the past. I’m warning you now folks, be prepared as we proceed. Some flappers not only show dainty demure ankles and wrists, but also blatantly bare legs and arms, in public!