My Great Aunt Fanny: From Flapper to Balaboosta

Meet my great Aunt Fannie.

She was one of the roaringest flappers of the roaring 20's. She could Charleston, Peabody, Fox Trot and Jitterbug with the best - and worst - of them. While she was having the time of her life, her family, traditional and religious, were not happy. They wanted her to leave the speakeasy’s and become a member of the Jewish KKK – Kallah’s who Kook, Klean, and Kvell about their children. (O.k., maybe they Kvetch a little, too, but they’ve earned it.) But Fanny was having none of it. Finally, at wit's end, her family found the answer to their prayers, in the form of Z’ev Rosenblatt.

Z’ev was an upstanding Yid, well-versed in Talmud and the Bible, and very conservative. A big man, his beard was twice Fanny’s size and three times as wild. Fanny, despite disagreeing with Z'ev on just about every subject, was inexplicably drawn to him, and found his ever-present pipe very distinguished. Of course, this was decades before such things were declared instruments of death, but ignorance, as we know, is bliss. In a classic case of opposites attracting, the two fell in love, Z’ev, the old immovable object, overpowering Fanny’s irresistible force and pulling her into his staid orbit. And so, they married.

Once married, the only thing Fanny flapped was jacks. In her new life, she poured all of the energy she used to use to paint the town red into whipping up delicious confections

– and Z’ev, into shape.

And so, going from speakeasy's to speaking no evil, except for the occasional constructive criticism of her man, my great Aunt Fanny lived happily ever after.