I remember vividly the umbrage my mother (born 1899) gathered up, expressed and projected in my direction when I [quite innocently] asked if she’d been “a flapper” back in the day. “Certainly NOT!” I think she said, but the withering tone was beyond any I think I’d ever encountered. A few minutes spent with The Flapper’s Dictionary is probably as close as one can get to understanding her animus. She was a person of considerable rectitude, inclined to take moral turpitudes Seriously: with eloquent fluttering of the eyelids she declared Sophie Tucker’s songs “suggestive” (and so they were, deliciously). Very early on, I learned which of my own realities to protect her from…