Like Fitzgerald, Tad Friend finds the ways of the rich, specifically the WASP rich, to be infinitely mysterious and romantic. As though, if need be, we could live for decades stoked only by clever remarks and gin fumes. As though all of us at the reception were above food and other pedestrian bodily necessities. But the difference was the manner in which these grotesque, bacon chestnut pellets were offered. What was this? On the rare occasions that my blue collar family entertained, my mother anxiously served appetizers on celery stalks and saltines topped with American cheese slices. The top-shelf liquor flowed freely, but the only food I remember was an appetizer consisting of a limp, glistening bacon strip, wrapped around a chestnut and secured with a toothpick. At least the food and drinks will be good, I thought. I was teaching at a college on Philadelphia's WASPy Main Line and one evening, I was summoned to a cocktail reception for the college's visiting trustees. For me, the difference was clarified many years ago by a cocktail appetizer. The rich are different from you and me, and not just because, as Hemingway said in his famous slapdown of that remark, they have more money. Book critic Maureen Corrigan has a review. Friend's new memoir, "Cheerful Money," reflects on his WASP heritage. But by birth, Friend is also the uneasy member of another kind of elite club: he's a purebred WASP. Tad Friend is a staff writer for the New Yorker.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |