Ugly – as in over the top blinged-out, cheap fabric (either
shiny or see through, or both), hyperbolic dimensions. Ugly – as in maladjusted
to the glamour or lack thereof of the event, the economic condition of the
subjects, or any of the above. The kind of dresses that we associate with that
untranslatable Hebrew concept of פרחיות (as in פרחה).
Happened to share this pressing
issue with LP. And she – thank you lord! – had the best suggestion. Well, not
suggestion so much as a bit of information to share. Turns out I am not the
only one who watches really, really bad reality television. Her particular indulgence
seems to be something called “My Big Far American Gypsy Wedding”.
Who knew it
(any part of it) even existed? But it does, and it is glorious.
Here take a look at some of the blushing,
chaste, and modest brides:
These, ladies, came up in the first three rows of Google search. Imagine what would turn up if I did more research!
Apparently the designer
to these stars is Boston-based. Boston Pride, people!
Yeees! These put all the
dress stores in Tel-Aviv’s shuk ha-Carmel (market) to shame, and
definitely readjust my views on what constitutes over the top chav.
The husband, who loves
when subjects in the humanities are analyzed in numbers, read to me the
following piece from his favorite econ blog, “The Marginal Revolution” (the
blog is quoting NYTimes’ piece by Robert H. Frank):
Fortunately, costs are
easier to estimate, and those for displaying a painting derive largely from its
market value. Consider“The Wedding Dance,”a 16th-century work by the Flemish
painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Detroit museum visitors have enjoyed this
painting since 1930. How much would it cost to preserve that privilege for
future generations?
A tidy sum, as it turns
out. According to Christie’s, this canvas alone could fetch up to $200 million.
Once interest rates return to normal levels — say, 6 percent — the forgone
interest on that amount would be approximately $12 million a year.
If we assume that the
museum would be open 2,000 hours a year, and ignore the cost of gallery space
and other indirect expenses, the cost of keeping the painting on display would
be more than $6,000 an hour. Assuming that an average of five people would view
it per hour, all year long, it would still cost more than $1,200 an hour to
provide the experience for each visitor.
What do I think about
it, you may ask?
Weeel. Unlike the
husband, I dislike it when we think about culture in numbers. Almost every time
culture turns out to be economically NOT viable. And yet, somehow, invaluable.
In this case, a couple
of issues are implicitly implied in this little citation, but not explored:
1) Detroit, once a successful
paragon of an American metropolis and an American industry, is a dying city
where packs of wild dogs rule the streets, houses sell for single digits, and
whole street blocks are empty of people. Description that frankly reads like
the zombie apocalypse.
2) The numbers for the
upkeep of an artwork is calculated based on an ‘average’ – but the average of
visitors in museums differs radically from museum to museum, and city to city.
The world’s major museums average many more visitors than a smaller museum in a
non destination city, let alone a city like Detroit which no one wants to
visit.
This two issues (or,
maybe one, since they are related) make me ask the following:
Are museums in
provincial cities ever profitable?
What if the Bruegel was
moved to a bigger city, to a major museum, say my favorite museum, the MET?
Surely many more people would see it. Hell, I’d take a trip right away. But is
that a justified move? It smacks of the good ole imperialist strategy of
looting your provinces (say, Egypt) of its culture and moving it, lock, stock,
and temples. Then again, the removal of artifacts and architecture from Egypt
saved great parts of it from ruin. If only the antiquities on the bottom of the
Aswan Dam were light enough to be moved before they were flooded into eternity…
no?
I hate almost everything ‘bout this look by she of the pointy chin,
Reese Witherspoon:
Lets break it down:
The jacket: a take on a
classic Chanel
The bag: a kinda, sorta,
classic Chanel
Why would I hate them?
Well, updating the classic Chanel jacket was done by the house itself under
Karl Lagerfeld, done every year, in fact, and done well. We do not need Tory
Burch for it. Same goes for the bag, although I personally have zero fondness
for the classic Chanel bag. I find it tacky and boring.
Let us continue our
break down:
The shoes: booooooring. I
can’t say I expected Sarah Jessica Parker to design well just because her
character in Sex and the City sometimes (repeat – sometimes) wore good clothes
(by and large the clothes were actually abysmal). But I thought she’d hire
someone who would. Instead her recently revealed shoe collection was a yawn.
This show, with nothing to show for it that hasn’t been seen in exactly the
same fashion before, is a perfect case in point.
The jeans: ah. Too
tight, too faded. They are like a bad cross breeding of the craze for acid-washed, whiskered
faded denim and the craze for much-too-skinny jeans. Just taaaacky. I think a post on jeans will be in order sometime soon..
The overall effect is
one of a bored, wealthy LA housewife, with too blond too straight hair and
accessories that are too expensive for a mere school run. Which is not that far
from reality, I suppose. And seems to be the preferred client of Tory Burch’s brand,
with its oversized gold insignia and utterly uninteresting, uninventive
designs. Amendment: there is one item in this look i love and would steal - the sunglasses. I think, judging by the arrow on the side, they are by one of my favorites, Karen Walker.
She was the Spice Girl
who could not really sign OR dance:
Who married David
Beckham in this:
And who was so thoroughly
‘chav’ that she used to look like this:
Well, one day she took
out her breast implants, took off her French manicure, and decided to
become a fashion designer. Yes, she attempted that twice, but the first
foray, a denim collaboration with Rock&Republic was blingy at best:
The second attempt,
under her own name, Victoria Beckham, was a whole different story. You see. the funny thing is that she is not bad. In
fact, she is more than that, she is terrific. She’s been at it for a few
seasons now, and the stuff is fantastic – sharp cuts, cool color combinations. The
rumor is that she does not design for herself, and the line does look
suspiciously similar to Roland Mouret in the cut and overall design. But still.
Check out this look, worn just now by Cameron Diaz (click on image to enlarge):
Perfect, no? Kicky
little skirt, awesome color combo.
I like complicated – in everything,
fashion included. And I like structural, architectural clothing, design that
doesn’t necessarily obey the laws of anatomy blindly. I like, in short, cerebral
and avant-garde fashion, that is often darker, not merely pretty.
Case in point: when
doing the promotional tour for that “Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” movie, Roonie
Mara had herself the most terrific stylist. Pretty much everything she wore was
on point, not only for the clothes in themselves, but also how these sartorial
choices were in direct dialog with the movie, and the role that the actress
portrayed. Almost nothing you would wear, but almost everything looked great. Bloggers I love, TomandLorenzo, called her style AudreyBot, a kind of futurist Audrey Hepburn, and I think their definition was spot on.
See for yourselves:
A Prabal Gurung dress:
A Givenchy dress, from a most divine collection:
Another Givenchy (she wore a few):
A Vuitton:
Miu Miu:
Nina Ricci, when designed by Thyskens:
After the promo tour was over Mara wisely
continued with these styling choices and did well. One of the bigger misstepts,
however, was this, by Balenciaga:
Sometimes, it seems, too
many design elements in one garment can be too much. Don’t get me wrong, I love
a good cape. But this is not a good cape. And if there is anything I absolutely
HATE, it is half see-through skirts. GRRRR. And half see-through skirts done in
white are even worse.
Similarly, Emma Stone,
she of the hilarious scene in “Crazy, Stupid, Love” (watch if you haven’t seen,
if only for Ryan Gosling’s perfectly manscaped chest):
So anyway, Emma Stone, another
actress with a really great stylist (and a much better off-stage personality than that the famously aloof Mara), wore this just recently, again by Balenciaga:
Oyi. The awkward shape
of the capelet jacket makes her look like humpty dumpty’s long lost sister,
with oddly re-attached arms. And this despite the fact that gray - black - white is my favorite color scheme. And my love for the complicated.
Ladies, I’m back. Sorry
for the no posting for a few days, but as some of you know I was in Israel for
my brother’s wedding. Posting shall now resume. I’m hugely grateful that you
read.
A long time ago, when
both she and I were young, I caught a Nicole Kidman made-for-TV film on
Jordanian TV channel (there was only 1 state channel in Israel and those of us
close enough to Jordan benefitted from their English language station –
probably a pet of Queen Noor). It was
some ditty about two girlfriends who go on a European vacation and meet a
dashing boy. Or something. All I remembered from that movie was her – a big mop
of red curly hair, the perfect upturned nose, blue eyes – everything that a
Jewish kid wanted but did not have.
Here:
When I look at Kidman
now I feel terrible sadness:
The outfit, the face –
they are all try hard, and not working.
Anna Wintour puts Kim Kardashian on the cover of Vogue and to discuss that singular achievement she
goes on a talk show in this:
Then again, maybe it is all par for the course. Maybe - and more than likely - KaKa is a creature of such careful celebrity calculation that she figured out that BAD TASTE is what sells her. If she started dressing tastefully all of a sudden it would probably make a single headline and then her spotlight would dim. As long as she dresses like an ass she can magnify her status, achieved by dressing like an ass, and known for dressing like an ass.
The Hebrew spelling of
Gwyneth Old English name looks remarkably close to the word for cheese. A super
organic cheese that she probably would not touch, because dairy is evil. It is
unclear how it came about that Paltrow commands such schadenfreude from the
public at large – but at least for me, her hauteur and general air of ‘better
than thou’ is grating. And while I can make the usual noises about the welfare
of the children, the divorce announcement of Paltrow and elevator crooner Chris
Martin made me laugh.
Here it is, in full
glory.
Conscious Uncoupling
It is with hearts full of sadness that we have decided to separate. We have been working hard for well over a year, some of it together, some of it separated, to see what might have been possible between us, and we have come to the conclusion that while we love each other very much we will remain separate. We are, however, and always will be a family, and in many ways we are closer than we have ever been. We are parents first and foremost, to two incredibly wonderful children and we ask for their and our space and privacy to be respected at this difficult time. We have always conducted our relationship privately, and we hope that as we consciously uncouple and coparent, we will be able to continue in the same manner.
Love, Gwyneth & Chris
Well, what I have seen
of divorce aint’ that pretty, bathed in a sepia light on a meadow. But maybe
money insulates…
Intrepid investigative
journalism uncovered the high-school pasts of the two anti-heroes of
Bridge-and-Tunnel-gate in New Jersey – the governor Chris Christie and David
Wildstein, the Port Authority official who signed off on the closing of highway
lanes that caused a mammoth traffic jam.
As it turns out these
two men populated diametrically opposed slots in high-school hierarchy –
Christie was a jock, a class president, and someone everyone seems to remember.
The other guy? Not so much. Almost no one seems to recall his presence at Livingston
High.
Which begs the question: did Wildstein help Christie so that he, the
overlooked nerd, would finally get noticed by the popular kid? Was it, in
short, high school that made him do it? And how many of us in the middle years of
our lives still carry about our high school scars out in the open for all to
see? (yes, that's my high school - Rene Cassin highschool in Jerusalem, the site of much torment)
High school pasts crop
up in conversation with girlfriends as well, more often than not in conversations
that circle about the future generation’s experience. Painful social dynamics
are the crux. We project our past traumas of geekdom onto the future, hoping to
inoculate our kids from the diseases that maligned us, way back when. Or maybe it isn't projection, or not just. Maybe we use projection as an excuse to redress our own gripes and inadequacies, to make sure that the social status that once eluded us is now in firm grasp - albeit in a different school, in a different time. But - boy! - we have (or not) learned enough to figure out how to secure the coveted spot.
Apparently I'm not alone in thinking about high-school all of a sudden now, a mom to two school age kids. Here is a story that has been making the rounds on FB (hat tip IV!), originally published in Boston Magazine. Sure, its about that uniquely American invention 'the Suburbs' but I wonder if you ladies in Israel or the UK will find parallels with the contour lines of your experiences, albeit in locals not called by that dreaded SUB name. Read it and weep:
The Terrifyingly Nasty, Backstabbing, and Altogether Miserable World of the Suburban Mom /ByJulie Suratt|Boston Magazine|
My husband and I moved to Wayland (population 13,000) from Jamaica Plain eight years ago. I’d been a magazine editor but had to stop working when my twin boys were born five weeks premature. I didn’t know anyone in town, and my efforts to meet new friends were impeded by February snowstorms and twin infants with severe reflux and colic. And then I heard rumors of a social clique called the Wayland Yacht Club, an exclusive group of couples who hosted elaborate gatherings at one another’s manses every month. At first I was appalled. Aside from the fact that Wayland isn’t on the water (it’s about as landlocked as you can get in the Boston suburbs), it just felt so, well, middle school to form a clique—and to give it a hoity-toity name to underscore its exclusivity. Who does that? Weren’t we beyond such pettiness? And then an unbidden thought flitted through my mind: Wait, why wasn’t I invited?
Here I’d thought all moms were in this muddle together—one big happy family, for better or for worse—when actually, just the opposite is true. It turns out that suburban life is dictated by the kind of tribal behavior I thought we’d grown out of: popular girls and their obsequious minions willing to do anything to fit in. But this time, with kids, money, and jobs on the line, the stakes are even higher. And so you have countless grown women cowering behind their beautifully trimmed hedges in bucolic towns around Boston, trying to avoid getting “fired” from their friend circle while simultaneously hating every minute they have to spend with those ladies who lunch. It’s a mom-eat-mom world out there, and I was pretty sure the Wayland Yacht Club was just the tip of the iceberg in this particular suburban nightmare.
It’s not like we women weren’t warned: Facebook CEO Sheryl Sandberg told us to keep working after we had kids—that it is possible to achieve an enjoyable work-family balance. Yet 5 million of us nationwide have stepped away from our successful careers to raise our progeny. And in her new book All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood, journalist Jennifer Senior details how having children can profoundly strain our psychology, our marriage, and our soul. Now I’m jumping into the conversation. I’ve found that the ennui new mothers feel when they quit their jobs and move out of the city can cause even the most confident of women to regress emotionally. Case in point: While many women were all too happy to share their stories with me, they were so afraid of mean-mom repercussions that they insisted I change their names and some of the details of their lives.
Like many women I interviewed, I’d always had an idyllic vision of myself perkily pushing a pram to the neighborhood tot lot alongside fellow moms. The reality of suburbia, with its expansive yards and lack of sidewalks, found me hefting my Bugaboo into the trunk of my Honda Pilot and driving across town to a playground, hoping to find a friendly face before the babies had to feed again. Living like this can exacerbate the isolation many moms feel.
That’s why, when you finally do meet someone to connect with, you latch on perhaps a little tighter than you would have in your old life. If the new friend comes with a built-in support system in the form of a gaggle of other moms, even better. Within a few years, you may discover that the only thing you all have in common is the age of your children, but by that time, it’s too late—you’ve shed your previous life and that random group of women has become the nexus of a tangled web of social obligations and expectations. Until, that is, you get voted off the island by the very people who were once your salvation. Then you can find yourself profoundly alone.
That’s how Emily’s life played out. When she and her husband, Tim, had their first child, they followed the migratory path of nearly every other couple they knew: They sold their condo in the South End and decamped to a suburb with good schools. But it wasn’t long before Emily, who’d quit a full-time teaching job to care for their newborn, found herself desperate for company in their tiny town of 5,000 west of Boston. Desperate, that is, until she met Veronica.
Attractive and outgoing, Veronica came with a posse of seven new moms who provided instant structure for Emily’s suburban life. Soon, the nine of them did everything together: play dates, cookouts, girls’ getaways to the Berkshires while their husbands played golf. “We were all the same age, had gone to the same schools, had kids at the same time, and went to the same church,” Emily says. Life was beautiful.
And then one Saturday afternoon a few years later, Emily went out to play tennis with college friends while Tim took the kids to their soccer game. All the guys were there, but the wives weren’t—turns out Veronica was hosting all of them at her Little Compton beach house. Everyone, that is, except Emily. Confused that his wife had been left out, Tim turned to Veronica’s husband and asked, “But what did Emily do?” His answer: “Oh, I’m sure nothing.” Later, Veronica explained to Emily that there simply hadn’t been enough room for everyone. “But,” Emily tells me, “I’d been to her house before—I knew that wasn’t true.”
Veronica’s betrayal signaled more than the end of a few friendships. In their small town, Emily couldn’t avoid the group of women Veronica commandeered, and their attendant thin-lipped smiles. They served as room parents for her three sons’ classrooms, they were on the board of the parent-teacher association, they volunteered at the library. Emily saw them at the market, church, Cub Scout meetings. Veronica was even the emergency contact for Emily’s kids (perhaps the highest compliment you can pay to a mother friend). “It was the hugest slap in the face,” says Emily, who adds that she was “completely blindsided” by her expulsion. Finally, emotionally exhausted, Emily told her husband, “We need to move.”
Before we have kids, we make thousands of choices: which house to buy, whom to marry, what profession to pursue. When we become parents, those choices continue—will you breastfeed? circumcise? practice attachment parenting?—but they suddenly define us in new, unexpected, and very public ways. That’s why the minute our children are born, we begin to search for like-minded women, a journey that binds some moms together and isolates those who can’t keep up. “When you have a kid, it’s like going back to high school,” says Deborah Hurowitz, a social worker who leads support groups for parents in Greater Boston. “Everybody is scrambling to figure out who they are, how they’ll fit in, and who they want to be friends with.”
I remember driving by Wayland Creative Preschool before my daughter was born and seeing the flock of moms gabbing in the parking lot every morning after drop-off. They’d stand in the warm sun with their iced lattes and catch up, looking like they had all the time in the world. This didn’t happen at my twins’ more academically focused preschool: It was purely “drop and go.” One of my friends even joked that Creative was the “cool preschool.” What did she mean? “Oh, it’s all the moms I want to hang out with,” she said. I waved off her comment, but secretly, I agreed.
So when it came time to choose my daughter’s preschool, Creative was at the top of the list. Did I choose it for the moms? Absolutely not. I was looking for a play-based preschool this time around with more kids from Wayland, and Creative fit the bill. But am I one of those moms lingering in the parking lot now? You betcha. That a large number of Creative moms, past and present, happen to be board members of the PTO, the Wayland Public Schools Foundation, the Wayland Swim & Tennis Club, and the Wayland Children & Parents Association—that’s a happy coincidence. So really, I figured, there was nothing wrong with finding a posse of like-minded women.
But a weird thing happens among women in the ’burbs. The mom group’s self-appointed leader—the Queen Bee, if you will—often has a potent sting. Sure, there are plenty of women who reign through goodwill, but there are also those who take pleasure in isolating and controlling their flock. It’s not easy telling the two apart, but one telltale sign is how carefully the Queen Bee picks her minions. Leslie, a nurse and mother of two west of Boston, says her Queen Bee sought women who were friendly, attractive, smart (“but not too smart as to make the Queen Bee feel stupid”), socially connected, fit, and financially secure enough to dine out and occasionally pick up the tab. Most of the women Leslie’s leader chose had children she deemed “appropriate and desirable.” They attended the right schools, played the right sports—lacrosse, soccer, and football—and had the right friends. “Children are something of an accessory in certain cliques,” Leslie observes.
Leslie was thrilled to be among the chosen ones. As Hurowitz says, “[Queen Bees] aren’t necessarily the nicest women, or the ones with the most friends, but somehow they have this cachet.” And for the women they single out, “it’s like, ‘Wow, they like me.’” But soon Leslie found herself spending way more money than she wanted trying to keep up with her friends, who never wore the same outfit twice, regularly treated themselves to manicures and massages, enrolled their kids in pricey gymnastics programs, and planned lavish getaways to the Florida Keys, where they’d spend $300 a person on a meal. (They even posted photos of their menus on Facebook.) “I love a girls’ weekend, but for something that’s so expensive, I’d like to spend time with my husband,” Leslie says.
Ironically, Leslie suspects her Queen Bee, whose husband is in sales, doesn’t have that kind of money to lay out. “She puts a lot of effort into looking like she’s got more than she does”—shopping on eBay for designer brands, carrying a Whole Foods reusable bag but shopping at Market Basket, and doing her nails at home—“yet ‘checking in’ from a salon on Facebook,” Leslie says incredulously. She always put herself in charge of the check at dinner, and “she’d put in less than everybody else—after ordering more drinks and expensive food,” Leslie adds.
“When it was just the two of us, she really was a different person,” Leslie says, explaining how she got sucked into her Queen Bee’s duplicity. “Now that I’m able to see her behavior clearly, I’m horrified I was ever associated with her…. I’m horrified that I allowed her to shape who I became close to, when there were other people who I really liked being around more.”
Listening to Leslie’s tales of anguish, I began to wonder whether, given the opportunity, I too could fall for a Queen Bee’s charms. To find out, I reached out to Melissa, a woman I’d met briefly before who used to head up a mothers’ group in her town northwest of Boston. In an introductory email, I asked her if she had any thoughts on the social hierarchy of moms in the suburbs—the premise being that when we have kids and move out of the city, it can feel like we’re back in high school. Melissa’s response was immediate: “Happy to weigh in…I will give you an earful!” We worked around her gym schedule and picked a time to meet.
Wearing a carefully chosen clique-bait outfit—a pair of Prada flats, black Denim & Supply jeans, and a pink batwing cashmere sweater—I drove to meet Melissa, passing by the elementary school in the town where Emily had once thrived. Each grade had only 80 kids, and Emily told me the running joke was “So, who’s your kid going to date?” At the time, Emily says that “we laughed about it, but really it just shows there’s so few adults there to be friends with.” Over the years, Emily ended up socializing with the same 30 couples at every gathering. “It was very comfortable because of how similar everyone’s backgrounds were,” she says—but admittedly, “homogenous.”
I continued past the town library, its parking lot chockablock with Range Rovers and BMW X5s with oversand vehicle permits and oval ACK stickers slapped on their bumpers. Meanwhile, a warning from Emily’s mother rang in my ears: “Nobody has anything else to talk about here. You need to go somewhere where people have a life.”
I pulled up to a sandwich shop and headed inside to meet Melissa. I picked her out right away: In her mid-forties, she was supremely confident, attractive, and fit in a Lululemon zip-front and black yoga pants. She waved and said, “Hi, Jules” with a familiarity that instantly warmed me to her. We’d met only a few times, but she had me at hello. We sat down at a booth, chatting like old friends, and didn’t get up for the next hour and a half.
A bleep censor would have a field day with Melissa: She’s not afraid to drop the f-bomb, and she playfully refers to her friends as “bitches.” I found her candor refreshing and strangely endearing. She’s no Stepford wife. She told me she has an MBA, but quit her finance job when her youngest daughter was two. Early on, she struggled “to find my identity as a nonworking mom.” She eventually got involved in the community, and her small group of friends grew to seven. She was “the fun one,” hosting ice-skating parties at her backyard rink, and organizing Christmas caroling, egg-decorating, pumpkin-carving, cookie swaps, and family getaways to her beach house. She was also incredibly giving, the type who’d send flowers on Mother’s Day to a friend whose mom had recently passed away, or clear a neighbor’s driveway after a snowstorm. “I like to do nice things for people,” she said.
But over time, Melissa started to question whether her friends “were supportive of me and my kids.” After a series of incidents that proved otherwise—including the time one of her friends invited Melissa’s kids to her daughter’s birthday party with the caveat that if Melissa’s high-energy daughter disrupted the party, she would be asked to leave—Melissa removed herself. “I created the group—I put a lot of money, time, and effort into these friendships—and then I walked away,” she said.
This caught me off-guard. “Wait. Did you consider yourself the head of the group?” I asked tentatively, stopping short of saying “Queen Bee.”
“Yes, I was the ringleader,” she replied.
Suddenly, I could see how easy it was to be lured in by a woman as self-assured, witty, and fun to be around as this. I really liked Melissa. In fact, I wanted to be friends with her. She was rougher around the edges—in a seemingly deliberate way—than the stereotypical profile of a Queen Bee, but my gut told me that when Melissa said, “Jump,” every woman jumped.
Melissa then told me stories of misunderstandings that had resulted in broken friendships—women being inadvertently left out of impromptu lunches, for example—but her innocent take could have easily veiled Queen Bee intentions. When Melissa asked, “I wonder if you talked to my friends, what they would say?” I knew I didn’t need to: I had an inbox full of emails from women spurned by Queen Bees.
So I’d met a real-life Queen Bee, albeit reformed, and walked away unharmed…but not uncharmed. I was beginning to understand why all these smart women were bankrupting themselves financially and morally to be friends with a Queen Bee. It’s actually quite simple. She’s a lot of fun, as long as you stay on her good side.
Of course, there’s a flip side to a Queen Bee’s charm: They often use emotional bribery to keep their minions loyal. They get close very quickly to learn secrets that can be used against people at a later date. “I’ve seen clients in tears talking about how they’d discuss a marital issue with the Queen Bee, and then it would be shared with the group,” Hurowitz says. “Queen Bees believe that they are in charge of disseminating information, and that’s part of how they maintain power.” Had Melissa done that to me? I’ll admit that although I’d walked in with eyes wide open, our conversation got personal fast.
Kelly says that her Queen Bee—Jessica, a thin, pretty, style-conscious matron in Concord with a self-deprecating sense of humor—operated exactly like that. She liked to gossip, but she’d try to present it in a nice way. “She’d say, ‘I feel so bad, but…’” Kelly says. “More appalling was when a friend had a third baby and was having a hard time and talking about her husband not helping. [Jessica] actually said it was the friend’s fault because the husband never wanted the third child.”
When Jessica overheard a neighbor making fun of a friend’s son’s skating skills at a hockey tryout, she decided it was her duty to tell on her. Eventually, Kelly asked Jessica what exactly she’d hoped to gain by sharing this painful piece of gossip. Her Queen Bee shrugged and answered, “She needed to know.” Kelly adds, “Jessica liked to put information out there and then sit back and watch what happened, and then go on damage control. My husband called her the ‘Rocket Launcher.’ So much ugliness surrounded her. I can’t imagine that still being in my life.”
Beyond controlling who knows what, and occasionally sending out a zinger, Queen Bees like Jessica work tirelessly to maintain their clique’s mystique; hence the constant threat of expulsion. And once a Queen Bee exorcises a member, watch your back. Leslie stood by while her Queen Bee banished another member through mean-spirited gossip. “I bought into the [negative things] she was saying about that woman,” Leslie says. “She criticized her parenting—how she chose to feed her children, for instance, or how she babied them.” There was enough truth in her Queen Bee’s asides to believe her, “but in hindsight, she’d blown everything way out of proportion.” When the victim didn’t show up to a group dinner, the Queen Bee would say, “I texted her over and over, and she never responded.” When the victim later said she never got the texts, the Queen Bee would tell the group that she was clearly lying. “I didn’t reach out to help her because it was very clear that it was either her or me,” Leslie says. A month later, “it was me.”
This endless fear of rejection can cause all kinds of anxiety and handwringing. Jennifer, a South Shore mom with two daughters and a master’s in social work, was thrilled when Elizabeth, the do-gooder of her neighborhood—“personable, dressed to the nines, beautiful home”—invited her to join her well-to-do town’s women’s social club. Within two years, she was asked to join the club’s board, and that’s when things went south, fast. Jennifer was already overwhelmed—in the middle of changing jobs and purchasing a ski house with her husband—and after much personal anguish, felt forced to resign from the board. When she revealed her struggle with depression to her friend, Elizabeth said dismissively, “Oh, that’s all? I thought you were dying.” Jennifer was dumbfounded: “She basically told me, ‘I’m glad you’re alive.’ And that was the end of the conversation.”
The fallout was immediate. Jennifer found herself subtly blacklisted from social gatherings and her kids excluded from car pools, play dates, and birthday parties. Elizabeth is “well known, she has cocktail parties and luncheons…. It’s silly, but we get caught up in it,” Jennifer says. “There’s this constant hierarchical undercurrent of ‘How do I fit in?’” Now when Jennifer sees Elizabeth around town, she gets a Mona Lisa smile from her former friend, who hardly pauses to acknowledge her. Jennifer recognizes her car—a Land Cruiser with a Black Dog sticker on the rear—and waves when Elizabeth passes by. “She never waves back,” she says.
Emily, whose ouster from her clique prompted her to move out of town, thinks she was ejected because the Queen Bee felt threatened that she had friends outside the group. They only did things with one another, which began to drive her crazy. “I started to remove myself—I’d meet up with friends from high school or college,” she says. “When I’d see one of [the clique], she’d say, ‘Where have you been?’ It was said in a tone that implied there was more to it. My life didn’t revolve around them.”
Leslie says her Queen Bee booted her because she decided that she “hadn’t behaved in a manner befitting of the group” at a party. “I wasn’t feeling well and had only half a drink,” Leslie explains. But the Queen Bee thought Leslie was drunk—a no-no among these ladies, who seem to think it’s their job to keep the suburbs clean and morally upright. “They’d created this perfect image of themselves, and they wanted everything to exemplify this image,” she says—even as they stabbed each other in the back in their attempts to clamber up the social ladder.
And sometimes, because a woman thinks or acts differently, she never even finds a way in. Consider Laura, a spirited, strawberry-blond Wayland physician who thought she’d figured it out. “I knew I sat on the opposite side of the table on many issues they found to be important, but I laid low and didn’t shove my opinions down their throats,” she says. “But I felt the more they found out about me, the more I began to feel different. The choices you make affect how we fit in and why.” Laura still remembers being excluded from a neighbor’s chicken-pox party (a social gathering during which deliberately unvaccinated children are exposed to the virus) nearly a decade ago. Her notable absence eventually led to an exclusion from all gatherings, even the neighborhood book club. Ironically, one of the moms confessed to Laura years later that she’d actually had her kids vaccinated, but didn’t tell anyone so she could still be part of the group. “Her husband said [not vaccinating their children] was not an option,” Laura says.
None of these women recognized the signals until she got the ax. One day Leslie was in; the next day, she was out. The silence was deafening. Leslie was sad and hurt, but “mostly angry. I went over in my head a million times what I had done wrong.” Eventually she came to realize she hadn’t done anything—that the Queen Bee was, “in the truest sense, a cold, bitter, unhappy woman.” She’s still hoping her Queen Bee gets her comeuppance, but she’s not holding her breath. “Women like this are very good about masking who they are to anyone that they perceive as important,” Leslie says. She’ll simply find another victim.
If you’re Emily, you go through the range of emotions detailed above—and then you pack up your belongings and move. She and her husband and three kids are now safely ensconced in a bigger Boston suburb, where there’s more diversity, a healthier mix of working and nonworking parents, and “the sophistication of living closer to the city. It’s much less cliquey,” Emily says with audible relief.
The truth is that there have always been cliques. Not everyone was invited to play bridge or attend the neighborhood Tupperware party—then again, they didn’t have to see it splashed all over Facebook the next day. “Social media has amplified [the mean-mom behavior] unimaginably,” Leslie says. That’s how she discovered that her tight-knit group of friends from her son’s preschool had planned a girls’ weekend to Las Vegas without her. She saw pictures of her friends partying on the Strip. And if that wasn’t enough, the comments on Facebook were full of inside jokes! emoticons!! multiple exclamation points!!! to let everyone else know how much fun they’d missed. A North Shore mom who sees countless photos of women enjoying evenings out on their boats explains, “It’s important to some people to seem like they’re in the middle of the right social circles.”
So I call my mother, hoping she can tell me why this behavior seems so much worse than when she was raising my sister and me 30 years ago. She agrees that technology has exacerbated the situation, then adds, “But honey, you also have to understand that my generation of women, for the most part, got married younger and knew that once we had children, our ‘job’ was to stay home and take care of them. Maybe our expectations were lower? I feel like you girls expect it to be fun, fun, fun all the time. My friends and I just wanted to get through each day.”
What do you mean by “fun, fun, fun?” I ask.
“Well, we certainly didn’t host cocktail parties every other weekend, and go on spa getaways, or couples’ trips to Mexico,” she replies.
So you think disposable income plays a factor?
“To a certain degree, yes,” she says. “But I think it’s more that you and all your girlfriends went to college and graduated school and had successful careers before you had children—more so than we did. So when you stopped working, you had all this pent-up energy and ambition, and you had to direct it somewhere.”
Toward raising our kids? I ask hopefully. Or volunteering?
“Or managing your social lives,” my mom adds dryly.
After spending this winter knee-deep in mean-girl antics, I’m drained. Clearly I’ve hit a nerve. Women have sought me out at parties, Starbucks, my boys’ basketball practice—even the elementary school pickup line—to whisper their stories. Everybody seems to know somebody who’s had a run-in with a Queen Bee or her minions—or she’s had one herself. I feel lucky to have made it through my first eight years in the ’burbs unscathed. The trick, I think, is to take a cue from your kid’s kindergarten teacher: If you’re going to bring cake, make sure you have enough for everybody. Indeed, following this edict can be a bit cumbersome. For instance, last fall it meant I ended up inviting 85 friends from my town to my birthday bash. And in retrospect, having this many friends probably means that I never committed to one group. Which may just be the reason I’ve survived out here in the ’burbs. As Melissa told me, “The nature of any group is to insulate its members from others—because that feeds the members’ continued participation.” It’s suffocating, and, inevitably, it implodes. The lucky ones come away with a sliver of their self-esteem still intact. Collectively, they vow, I will never let myself get so enmeshed in a friendship again.
Close friends of ours who are considering a move from the South End with their one-year-old daughter are understandably hesitant after hearing the topic of this article. “I already see hints of that in my neighborhood,” Jenn says. “Do I really want to deal with it in the suburbs?” I assure her that the majority of women I know are not like that. And really, aren’t we going to outgrow such juvenile behavior anyway? I’ve taken comfort in that thought…or at least I did until a few weeks ago, when a friend sent me a New York Times article titled, “Mean Girls in Assisted Living.”
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What I wonder is this:
do these wounds ever heal? Can the unpopular kid change her/his spots enough,
reinvent her/himself enough to prove to themselves that high-school is surpassed,
that it is in the PAST?
I used to think that while people fundamentally stay
the same the outwardly packaging can be altered. I still subscribe to
that view, even if my own confidence is dimmed by recent developments. In
high-school we felt helpless to master anything, now we know that mastery is an
illusion, and maybe that’s the whole point. You know how they say that what
makes French women attractive is not what they look like but what they project?
I’m up for drinking for projecting joy, if not mastering its internalization.
Posting on the death of
a celebrity seems to me wrong – you are riding on the coattails of fame,
attempting to bask in some of the spotlight that shone on said celeb. Various “oh,
the loss of a great talent” posts on FB following the death of Philip Seymor Hoffman
read to me as pathetic, reiterating the obvious without adding an ounce of
dignity to their authors. I am not, therefore interested in posting on L’Wren
Scott’s suicide. What opinions I have of her designs (and I have) I can share
later.
That said, this story from NYPost is an interesting read, even if it somehow
manages to equate her with some of the Real Housewifed Bravocelebs – two groups
separated by thousands of miles on the totem pole of fame.
To look at her carefully curated Instagram feed, designer L’Wren Scott was a 1-percenter, a gold-plated member of the international elite: There she was on vacation in India with boyfriend Mick Jagger; at his retreat on the island of Mustique; about to board a chartered helicopter; lounging poolside in gold jewelry and designer sunglasses; stretched out on a private plane, using her $5,000 Louis Vuitton handbag as a footrest.
“I always say luxury is a state of mind,” Scott told The Sunday Times of London last November. “Because for me, it really is. It’s legroom, it’s a beautiful view, it’s great food at a great restaurant you’ve discovered because you obsessively read Zagat, as I do.”
And then, last Monday, she committed suicide, hanging herself in a $5.6 million Chelsea apartment that likely did not belong to her. Within hours, Scott’s life was revealed to have become an elaborate facade — her business at least $6 million in debt, her fashion-world friends and celebrity clientele unaware of her despair.
“Ironically, last week I said to three different people, ‘I wish I had her life, look at her life — she’s always somewhere fabulous and fancy,’ ” stylist Philip Bloch told WWD. “You think, here’s someone who has it all. You just never know.”
While the chasm between Scott’s marketed life and her actual life came as a shock, she was just one of countless New Yorkers who secretly fake their fabulous lives.
To be fabulous
As of September 2013, the median household income in New York City, according to the US Census, was $50,895. According to a 2012 report issued by the City Comptroller’s Office, 49 percent of New Yorkers had unaffordable rents — and rent, for half of us, gobbles up more than 30 percent of our income. This month, Forbes magazine ranked New York City the most overpriced metropolis in America.
Ironically, the New Yorkers most expected to live with no budgets, no cares and no limitations are members of the creative class, people with typically low-paying glamour jobs in media, the arts, fashion, publishing.
And the closer their proximity to wealth and fame, the higher the pressure — recall celebrity photographer Annie Leibovitz, one-time owner of three conjoined West Village townhouses who found herself $24 million in debt in 2009.
“How Could This Happen to Annie Leibovitz?” asked New York magazine. In 2004, Leibovitz was caring for her father, who had cancer, as well as her partner, Susan Sontag, who had also been diagnosed with cancer. She spent thousands shuttling Sontag around the country, in a private plane, for treatment.
But Leibovitz was also done in by reckless spending, possibly aggravated by too much time in the company of cultural and political power brokers.
“I see this a lot,” says Norah Lawlor, a longtime publicist who met Scott several times. “You come here, change your name and want to be fabulous. You get caught up.”
Scott was originally Luann Bambrough and was raised in a small Utah town by adoptive Mormon parents. But at some point, the persona she projected in the pages of Vogue — cool-girl courtesan to a rock ’n’ roll lothario, designer to A-list clientele — became her reality.
Until it wasn’t.
“She was turning 50, her business was closing, and she’s friends with celebrities but can’t go to them [for help],” Lawlor says. “People come to New York City and want to be part of a certain clique, and think they are. But it often catches up to them.”
The writer’s life
In 2008, Emily Gould, a former writer at Gawker, appeared on the cover of The New York Times Magazine, and the accompanying article helped land her her first book deal. Manhattan was still in a “Sex and the City” haze, with thousands of would-be Carrie Bradshaws shopping and blogging and the global financial crisis just months away. Gould’s advance: $200,000. She was 28 years old.
“People who don’t know think, ‘Oh! You’ve won the lottery!’ ” Gould says. “Two hundred thousand dollars — even though it’s a lot for a first book — it wasn’t crazy by any means.”
Gould was hired at Gawker in 2007 with a starting salary of $45,000 a year — what she was making at her previous job as an associate editor at a publishing house. Even though she knew her $200,000 advance was a lot less in the real world than it was on paper, she says “that still didn’t stop me from making the decisions I made.”
She kept her one-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn, where she lived alone, paying $1,700 a month in rent. Health insurance was another $400 a month. She bought new clothes and went to good restaurants and had entree into a new social circle, a group of equally fabulous people who loved doing equally fabulous things.
“Socially, it’s a boon,” Gould says. “You were able to casually do things — go shopping in Soho with someone who walks into stores and they’re known by name. My thinking was nonexistent: ‘La-la-la. I’ll put the things I can’t afford right away on a credit card.’ People who are working in film, or in any creative job where you’re in flush times — it’s hard to believe it will ever end.”
To the outside world, Gould was a phenom who, one year into her career as a blogger, wound up with a six-figure advance and media-vacuum fame. In actuality, Gould had done the math, and here’s how her book deal — like most every book deal — broke down:
• $200,000 in four installments: one-fourth upon signing, one-fourth upon acceptance of the manuscript, one-fourth upon hardcover publication, one-fourth one year later or upon paperback publication.
• 15 percent ($30,000) to her agent.
• After-tax take-home: about $45,000 a year, her original salary
Then, in May 2010, her memoir, “And the Heart Says Whatever,” was published. It sold about 8,000 copies — or, as she recently wrote, “a fifth of what it needed to sell to not be considered a flop.”
The book’s poor sales meant she’d never get that kind of advance again, and Gould, New York’s newest fabulous young writer, found herself jobless and broke. She could no longer afford to run with her more privileged friends.
“It was a fun peek into a world that I don’t think I’ll have access to in the foreseeable future,” she says.
Gould now works at two startups and has sold a novel, “Friendship,” for $30,000. She rarely dines out anymore, and no longer has a credit card.
“Now, when younger writers talk to me, I tell them to get a job,” she says. “There are a lot of people who think being a writer is glamorous, but anyone who does it for a living knows there’s nothing glamorous about it.”
‘Real’ and fake
When Alex McCord was cast to star in a reality series on Bravo in 2007, she thought it was going to depict the lives of frazzled Manhattan moms. But after the success of “The Real Housewives of Orange County,” the concept was retooled. It became “The Real Housewives of New York City” — a peek into the private lives of the city’s wealthiest women. The mandate was clear: Consume, consume, consume.
“That first season,” McCord says, “every single one of us went out of pocket and spent more money than we made.” Each Housewife got $10,000 for that first season, which didn’t cover the parties they were expected to throw, or the clothes they were expected to buy, or the trips they were supposed to take.
“There is tremendous, tremendous pressure among the Housewives to have the biggest, blingiest, most tricked-out lifestyle,” says McCord, who now covers the franchise on TheStir.com. “I was absolutely shocked when we first started doing this. We’d finish shooting a scene and go for drinks or dinner afterward. And we stopped doing that because you wouldn’t believe how many people skipped out on the bill.”
Over the franchise’s eight-year lifespan, 12 Real Housewives have filed for bankruptcy, one has been evicted on camera, several have battled substance-abuse issues, one couple has pleaded guilty to fraud in federal court, one husband has been indicted for fraud and identity theft, and one husband has committed suicide.
What makes it easier for New York City Housewives to fake it, says McCord, is the proximity to fashion designers, publicists, restaurateurs and charity organizers — most of whom are happy to barter free goods for camera time.
Or were.
“The problem is that the darker these seasons have gotten” — alcholism, divorce, foreclosure — “the less these companies want to be involved.” Besides, she adds, the more Bravo “clings to the branding of the Housewives as ‘Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous,’ the more these people have turned out to be financial frauds.”
Chasing ‘model’ lives
In the world of fashion modeling, the pressures are much the same. “It’s a superficial industry where there’s always a significant gap between image and reality,” says model and activist Sara Ziff, executive director of The Model Alliance. “The vast majority of models do not command vast sums and are working in debt to their agencies.”
And the more high-profile the job, the less a model is paid — if she’s paid at all. “It’s a little-known fact that most designers don’t pay models to walk,” Ziff says. “They’ll pay in trade: a tank top, or samples from their last collection. Of course, you can’t pay your rent with a tank top.”
To make ends meet, models commonly agree to shoots they’d otherwise never do, Ziff says, or submit to “inappropriate offers.” And then there are the club promoters who sidle up to the most naive, offering them free food and drinks while using their presence to boost a nightspot’s profile.
“It’s a little sad,” Ziff says. “Many of these girls have no idea that this underground economy exists. They think these promoters are their friends — and it’s a business where relationships and who you’re friends with, or at least who you pretend to be friends with, is very important.”
So you have models who need to be friendly with the right designers, and many of these designers can’t afford to pay these models because they’re barely getting by themselves. (Rachel Roy is the latest designer to go out of business, folding two weeks ago. Her ex-husband, former rap mogul Damon Dash, was worth $50 million but is now broke.)
It’s a city where you go to the rock show or the play or watch the fashion runway at Lincoln Center, and just about everyone on that stage is barely making ends meet even though they look like they have it all and more.
Intentionally or not, Scott’s suicide laid bare the unglamorous truth about her life and the world she so tenuously inhabited.
“In the midst of all the air kisses,” Ziff says, “are a lot of relationships that are extremely superficial. And a lot of people don’t have the emotional support to back them up.”
