Word: flapperisms
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Allan Sherman decided early that he had to laugh. His father was an automobile mechanic and inventor who belted down bourbon by the glassful and disappeared when Allan was six. His mother was a fun-loving flapper who had four husbands and bought books with jackets to harmonize with her draperies. Sherman grew up in Los Angeles, Miami, Chicago and New York. After 21 public schools and the University of Illinois, he packed up a suitcase full of his songs, settled down in New York for seven lean years as a starving television gagwriter. Then...
Until 1926, it was just another pronoun. After that, It became the most provocative two-letter word in the language-all because of her. She was Clara Bow, the ultimate flapper for the movie audiences of the '20s, grown too sophisticated for the synthetic, exotic Theda Bara ("Kiss me, my fool") and Pola Negri. Clara Bow, by contrast, was as fresh and authentic as the girl next door, only more so. She had enormous saucer eyes, dimpled knees, bee-stung lips and a natural boop-poop-a-doop style. She was the cat's pajamas, the gnat...
...roaring '20s, the family comics came along. Such respectable folk as the Gumps neither played the stock market nor swilled bathtub gin; it was probably no accident that Andy Gump was chinless. Blondie began life as a sharp-tongued flapper, but she soon settled down to suburban housewifely routine and is still the most widely read strip.* Little Orphan Annie veered from the family pattern since she lacked parents. But Daddy Warbucks, a billionaire arms manufacturer, has more than made up for their absence. With his help, ageless Annie has plowed under no end of evildoers while issuing...
...love. But to save Sam's sanity, the child is raised as Sam's son. and grows to hate his real father. Years pass. Sam bloats with pride. Darrell shrivels with self-contempt, and Nina pins her heart on her son's sleeve until a flapper (Jane Fonda) steals...
Belatedly, the flapper is beginning to flourish in Russia. Called chuvikha (slang for female), she dabbles in sex and tipples vodka, cares more about fashions than factories. Russian cartoons criticize her rebelliousness, lampoon her fickleness. With heavy Victorian moralizing, the press points out the tragedies of good girls gone wrong. Stimulated rather than appalled by all this attention, the chuvikhi lap it up. Last week they had another heroine...