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Mar. 4th, 2006 10:56 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rmMany 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.
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.
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Date: 2006-03-05 12:13 am (UTC)So, uhm, I'll be sending my daughter to you for part of her education then? Because that is the world I read of and daydreamed most of my childhood in, and as much of my life as I could. My mom did not always have the time to help or allow me the 'not at all', even as she understood and also missed (and had not really had) what you are describing. Actually, that's pretty much exactly what she wanted for me and how I disappointed her. Between that and the midwest location, my sense of appropriate is rather warped from yours, but I so appreciate yours, truly.