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(Continued from NEO CLASSISM)
Dear Friends,
Please forgive my recent absence, but in lieu of parenting, working or whining in the pages of this blog, I’ve instead for the last three weeks been galavanting around the French countryside terrorizing the locals with my unintelligible French and insatiable demands for attention. FINALLY unshackled from the thankless demands of my familial life, I decided to leave my computer at home, and like the proverbial locust, shamelessly plunder any bottle of wine, loaf of bread, or frustratingly indifferent cabin boy placed before me. I am pleased to tell you that I have now returned to the US and found that unlike the French, what with their boring old interest in art, politics, and gastronomy, our American cultural cup brims over with Pizza Hut, oil spills and Kim Kardashian.
God – it’s good to be home.
When last you heard from me, I had brought my son Ethan to New York City and was prepared to deliver him to the good people at Camp Walt Whitman. As you might expect, New York in June can get ungodly hot, and this June was no exception. The city was stifling and smelly, and my son Ethan who is very much accustomed to the air conditioned comfort of his chauffeur-driven, politically correct Toyota Prius began to wilt. As I dragged him down a blazing 42nd street towards the subway, his gait slowed and his small palm sweated in mine. He grimaced, put his hand to his nose and said “Daddy let’s take a town car. It smells gross here. It smells like…I don’t know… like poor people!”
Despite the blazing sun and acrid stench I stopped in my tracks and gave Ethan the stink eye. While his statement was candid and snobbishly amusing, I wondered at what point in his alarmingly sheltered life had my son, Marie Antoinette, concluded that poor people smelled like rotting garbage? To my knowledge, Ethan’s pampered, priviliged life of private schools, nanny-monitored play dates, and palatial weekend homes, was devoid of actual poor people. The only poor person Ethan knew personally was ‘Crazy Mary’ our Los Angeles neighborhood homeless woman whose unabated screaming and morning ‘toilette’ consisting of relieving herself in our Armenian neighbor’s faux-marble lawn fountain had become the stuff of legend. While Ethan may have observed Crazy Mary thrashing about the neighborhood, my husband George and I had never permitted Ethan to get close enough to Crazy Mary to actually smell her. Where did Ethan pick up this troubling association? I was so disturbed by my son’s snobbery and lack of empathy, that I decided to cancel our field trip to Cartier and Louis Vuitton and instead planned on showing Ethan the ‘real’ New York.
(To be Continued)
It’s so funny, kids are so honest and direct, arent they!? LOL!!! I mean, it’s of course our job as parents to redirect them to more appropriate ways of expressing themselves…. but you gotta love that candor! lol.
New Follower!
Why worship a morsel of Époisses de Bourgogne when you get can similar satisfaction from that American gastronomic treat known as the Cheetos! >burp<