For years now, people have been looking forward to the 2020s simply because the 1920s were full of style, happenings, and pizzazz, as if we are guaranteed the same. As if the 1820s promised the people of the 1920s a decade of frivolity and good times and that’s why they had it. The 1920s were so bigtime that even a hundred years later, they seem fresh and exciting, if you ignore the appalling aspects.

Even though I love reading about history, I have no desire to repeat the 1920s. I live in the Now, I am all for the present and the future. I am disinterested in Gatsby Parties, societies of creative anachronism, and all of that wistful yearning for days so far gone by that we were never in them to begin with. But I do fully encourage learning from the past and using what you want to re-use for the betterment of life and living today.

In order to understand the Old Twenties, you need to consider that the 1910s were a different world completely. People get excited about notions of the Jazz Age because it was the first true modern age and it is kind of the first decade where you can imagine going back via time machine and getting along, for the most part, depending on who you are and where you landed. But the 1910s had the hard-hearted tycoons, the grandiose Gilded Age splendor, World War I, and the Spanish Influenza. Three of those things resulted in a lot of dead people and all of them made life sad! I think by the close of the 1910s, anyone left living felt like they’d just gone through the ringer and they were ready to celebrate.

In these New, Better Twenties, we are fairly coddled as long as we are not having even a hint of a medical emergency. But we are used to having things, and are too-used to planned obsolescence and consumerism — all things that were just getting started one hundred years ago. I hope most of us have developed the cynicism required to resist the ways of advertising which our great and great-great grandparents did not have.

We are not experiencing a Prohibition. In many ways, it is the opposite as the devil weed is being legalized, even for recreational use, in many of our united states. I think the mood of the younger generations is less trusting of authority. We certainly don’t feel like the world’s heroes, and everyone seems to be perpetually braced for the worst. It’s charming, but that is decidedly unlike that Old Twenties.

Anyway, I’m rambling unnecessarily. You don’t need to know about how unlike the 1920s we are to color this coloring page I have made for you! I hope the two of you out there who enjoy doing these enjoy it!

In this scene, Dollissa and I (and the Captain and Jackson as my luxury furs) dance on the Sneer HQ’s back porch while cchris does not dance. His loss!

And if you are so inclined, here is a transparent file of the same image, if you like to get fancy and copy paste into an art program of some sort. Good for you, being all capable like that!