I dance in a hundred-year-old dress.
I Charleston in respect to the roaring era when this dress, and the exceptional modern woman who wore it, ecstatically dazzled in freedom, ambition, heart-propelled purpose.
When I first shimmy into my great-grandmother Maude’s dress, I feel the immediate weight of the beads.
From a quick glance, the authentic flapper relic appears light, sheer, a faded sunflower yellow, and so the heaviness of those subtle beaded designs surprises me.
Only when I adorn the dress is my attention commanded to feel, to notice the tiny gold and delicate pink beads elegantly festooning in a detailed floral pattern that drapes to the fringed hem.
The beads orchestrate a rustling melody that announces my steps, musically measures my strides, and yet, when I dance, I am weightless, fluid, air-bound.
As I spin and sway, the beads jingle and cascade in a splendid, effortless ruckus. Swept up in liberated motion and in a dress singing a hundred-year-old chorus, I radiate a spontaneous joy that flickers a wistful hope that this freeing empowerment is what Maude felt too.
Maude’s life, especially her full-fledged flapper days, captivate my imagination.
In 1920, she purchased this sensational dress for $100. The night before prohibition dried up the bars, she hopped on a train to DC and wildly partied, and afterward, snuck underground and frequented a few speakeasies. A dashing man popped a gigantic diamond ring on her finger and she returned the ring with a clear and decisive NO. Later, when the stock market crashed, the wealthy man jumped off a building in New York. She tells her daughter and her daughter tells me: “It just wasn’t right.” The extravagant money, the indulgent lifestyle, the love match…maybe all three.
She says YES to studying early childhood education in Chicago. She focuses her academic pursuits on a radical notion…kindness. She pivots from the norm of corporal punishment and shame to maintain classroom discipline and instead learns the principles of kindness to teach, encourage, enlighten.
Last year, I traveled with my spirit-word of kindness that leads me to discover, which she probably did, that kindness is magic. And my connection to her glistens in magic.
These days, I call upon her as a prayer to summon within myself the spirited courage to seize and Charleston with life. She believed in kindness and motivated children through kindness, she fancied and flirted in sequined yellow, and charted her own course in hustling, big cities.
At thirty, my skin feels like this dress, weighted with the invisible etchings of experiences, challenges, embraced opportunities and unraveling heartbreaks, but when I remember to dance, that I can indeed Charleston, to breathe in the exquisite air of the moment, I am free. And in that flapper-fantastic freedom, I sense and see Maude vivaciously championing her great-granddaughter to continue to become, and in my becoming, I send ripples to the women who are with me, who will come after me.
I dance in a hundred-year-old dress and feel utterly renewed in present-empowered being.