Many years ago, while looking at cufflinks in Today's Man with Michael (there was some event, maybe even something grim -- I can't remember why he was shopping) he made a remark to me, that I wish I could recall precisely. I do remember though that it was about the world in which I was comfortable and about how I should have "blue-blood well-hung sons." I had laughed, and bristled. I wasn't so Upper East Side as all that; I had never fit in in the world I had grown up in, mainly because I simply hadn't belonged there. We didn't have that sort of money. Besides, not only was I Jewish culturally, I was Italian, which in the history of America has not always been "white," and certainly never "blue-blood" (the the surreal quality of issues regarding race and Italian descent became more apparent in Australia, where Italians were let in en-masse post-WII because they were considered white, but that's a digression that isn't only irrelevant to this post, but is just sort of irrelevant and crazy in general, as race things tend to be). But now that I live in Spanish Harlem, which is not, as has been rudely pointed out to me even when I joke, "the very upper east side," I find myself, because of the neighborhoods I must travel through, thinking of the remark often.
And the truth is, I am desperately comfortable on the Upper East Side. My body unknots instinctively in a cab going down 5th Avenue -- the park and snow and mansions, the museum, the right sort shops as we get into town. That is a thing New Yorkers, I think only of the generations older than me, say -- going into down -- meaning 57th and 5th, meaning Bergdorf's and Tiffany and men with advertising jobs. I like the small markets of Germantown, and custom shops for everything. When I was a child we went to the butcher, the baker, the candy shop. When I have time and funds I do things this way even now. I like the shopping on Madison Avenue and the side streets and townhouses, being buzzed into stores without price tags. This is, in the end, my New York, whether I wish it to be or not, whether I can afford it or not.
And sure, my parents are artists and as a child, took me to Soho when it was nothing and certainly not Rodeo Drive. And I love downtown, the East Village and Tribeca for all the times its broken my heart, but those were secret things, specialized knowledge in a city full of magic. But now they're common, and my expertise of the city, of things unknown, has become not about the prismastic world Downtown (said with a drawl and meaning below Zeckendorf goddamn Towers), but of the old world, perhaps a dying one, Uptown.
I bemoan the casualization of the world a lot. And to people who don't know me, it seems an absolute (and annoying) facade; it probably even seemed so to Michael, mainly because for all our relentless conversation I never had the sense and self-possession to even attempt to express myself to him completely. But seriously, I really hate going into egregiously loud restaurants with $25+ entres to see people in jeans. That's not how it's done. And don't get me started on the theatre. Because I'll get called a snob and people will be mean to me. But I am a snob. Someone has to be.
I don't believe life is about having or spending money. But I do believe it's about acting with the dignity befitting an occassion, which I do as much as I can, often on $10 dresses, rush tickets, and packed lunches. I find a way. I do things right or sometimes not at all. Maybe this is wise, or maybe this is constant loss, I don't know. But I took a cab to work this morning, and as we swung down Fifth and I smiled at my reflection in the window of the taxi, against the park still covered in snow, I said yes, I am an Upper East Side woman, through and through, lunches, Sex in the City and plans for sons be damned.