A Run For Your Money by Nigel Roth

It’s a hot and steamy night in the summer of 1926, and the Del-Fey Club in Miami is hopping with the sounds and sights of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jazz Age.

Stay awhile and you’ll see young men and women, rising like phoenix from the horrors of the first World War, and recovering from the economic collapse of the early twenties, swinging the Turkey Trot or the Buzzard Lope, the Chicken Scratch and the Monkey Glide, doing the Shimmy and the Bunny-Hug, and ‘losing their innocence again’ with the Charleston.

Of course, at times like these you want your mind to be as intoxicated as your body, and a glass of lemonade just won't cut the mustard. What you need is “alcohol, the rose-colored glasses of life.”

That’s not an easy thing to come by if you’re in the middle of the temperance movement’s greatest hour, the Volstead Act, or, to you and I, desperate for a cold beer or a large whiskey and ginger, Prohibition.

But we’re in luck, because the Del-Fey Club is also a speakeasy, so the evening can and will include an alcoholic beverage, or two. And, we can thank a Texas-born actor for that, whose rise to fame as an entertainer, hostess and bon viveur, means we can enjoy a very full evening indeed.

Mary Louise Cecilia Guinan, later known adoringly as Texas Guinan, was born in 1884, just as the cornerstone of the Statue of Liberty was being laid on Bedloe’s Island. There’s a certain irony to that, as Texas Guinan’s freethinking made Del-Fey’s, and before that the Beaux Arts Club, the El Fey Club, and the Texas Guinan Club, a hub of Prohibition rejection.