True Prep

by Lisa Birnbach

  When the Chans ask you for a letter of recommendation to the board of the co-op apartment they wish to buy. When Joe Washington asks you to sing his praises to the admissions committee at the club. When Pookie Powell needs an in at Princeton. When the Goldbergs want that single non-sibling girl’s space in the nursery-school class. These are all occasions when you could be asked to write a letter on behalf of someone else. Similarly, there may come a day when you will need a good word from Adrian Chan, Joe Washington, Pookie Powell, or Amy Goldberg, so this is not a time to cavil. Unless you have a damned good reason for not being able to write the letter,* just prep up and write the letter. For example:

  TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN:

  I have known Adrian and Eleanor Chan for twelve years, having met them when their Claire and my Alfred attended St. Timothy’s. Since that time both families have enjoyed many happy occasions together. Indeed, Christmas isn’t Christmas without Eleanor Chan’s warm but quiet hospitality.

  Having bought at the top of the market in a limestone prewar building in 2007, I fully understand Adrian’s wish to rent until now. You could say that in addition to his good financial sense, he is a prudent man, the kind any of us would love to have as a neighbor. The Chans are a low-key, discreet family, not at all interested in entertaining. Not only would he make a fine addition to your building (I also know the Alberts in 4E), but I am certain that you could benefit from Adrian’s joining the board. I have the highest regard for the Chan family: Adrian, Eleanor, Claire, John, and their silent French bulldog, La Neige.

  Please do not hesitate to call on me if I can be of further assistance to you.

  (Note, no xxx’s or ooo’s.)

  Yours sincerely,

  Adam Taylor Frimbo

  *Acceptable reasons include: You truly can’t stand Eleanor Chan. (No one likes her, but they love Adrian.) Joe Washington denied you a ride home once when you couldn’t find your car following a prolonged Happy Hour after work. Your son flunked out of Princeton (duh). Despite your asking him to cut it out, Andrew Goldberg continues to slap your behind.

  What is the well-dressed desk wearing this season? This and every season, it is outfitted in timeless classics. Smythson of Bond Street, Mrs. John L. Strong, Tiffany, or your local engravers have been in the business of selling writing papers, leather-bound notebooks, and small leather goods for traveling for decades. Scattered about, here are some adorable accessories provided by Verdura—the enamel desk clock, the silver bamboo pen, and the sterling-silver sea urchin pencil sharpener. What else could you ever need?

  Your trove of personalized cards, papers, and envelopes will run out one day, and then you get to restock. Unless you’ve moved, gotten married or divorced, or changed your name, the Smythson deep blue stationery can always be your signature. Or your signature’s signature. Hold onto your die!

  Unlike their generally Luddite ancestors, the new generation of preps seems to have embraced the Internet, making it their very own cyber country club. Long ago, in the annals of reinvention, Jerry Rubin of the Chicago Seven (Google him if you are thirty-five or younger) cut his hair, bought some nicely tailored suits, and taught New Yorkers how to “network.” Before the Web, preppies formed social networking groups, like the Junior International Society, a regular calendar of parties thrown by Marc de Gontaut Biron, a Euro-aristo who would gather his Rolodex (remember those? see here) of well-bred pals to meet at nightclubs like Au Bar in New York City. But with the Internet, who needs to get dressed up (or even dressed) and actually socialize in person, when you can make all the connections you need without ever leaving your laptop?

  The first Web site to kick-start the online social scene was Friendster, which became an open site in August 2006. In the beginning, preppies flocked to Friendster, but when other sites like MySpace started hogging new members, Friendster quickly faded away. Today it’s reported that over 90 percent of Friendster’s traffic comes from Asia. And that doesn’t mean that true preps on vacation on a Thai island are logging in and updating their profiles.

  Friendster’s swift demise can be blamed on one site: Facebook—which went from a Harvard site in 2004 to a buzz bin where porn stars promote their latest dirty videos and online flirting is the norm—is democratic, if not pure anarchy. Anyone can join, and fake celebrity profiles are as ubiquitous as photos posted of boarding-school kids huddled around a keg, red plastic cups and Parliament Lights in hand. Preps are loyal Facebookers and make sure only to accept friend requests like “Your third kid is so cute. Always loved the name Cricket!!!” but then there are the naughty preppies … Marriages and engagements have been broken up by errant scandalous photos of a “work weekend” being posted and tagged on FB. For the still-in-school set, be warned: Big Mummy is watching. That photo of you inhaling is just one Google search away from being sent home, where the only face time you’ll get, Missy, is in group therapy.

  Some preppies found Facebook a little too much of a free-for-all, and invitation-only sites started to pop up all over the Web. For example, to join asmallworld.net (where members post announcements like “Seeking motorcycle and hot girl to tour Italy and stay in five-star hotels”), one must be invited by a member with “invitation rights”—meaning they have proven to be an invaluable member of this “small world.” Even though members are warned to only accept connection requests from people they actually know in the “real world,” some people boast hundreds of “connections,” proving it’s actually not a small world after all. Because preppies love to be surrounded by other preppies, asmallworld.net’s list of recommended restaurants ranks a highly regarded serious foodie temple like Le Bernardin equal to the East Side watering hole J. G. Melon, which serves mostly hamburgers and club sandwiches.

  Taking a cue from asmallworld.net, APrivateClub.com is very members-only. Listing which private schools and Ivy League colleges you attended and who you know is the key to entry. The Web site boasts, “APrivateClub members are leaders in social and cultural organizations. All members are between the ages of 21 to 40 years old and many were born and raised in Manhattan.” The site requires a formal written application and an in-person interview. Think of it as the cyber version of applying for membership at The Bathing Corporation in Southampton, minus the ocean, your parents’ charge account, and the over-forty crowd with permanent windburn.

  —Peter Davis

  Great sportsmanship is not secondary to being a fine athlete. It is neck and neck as important as one’s prowess. You don’t have to sacrifice one to have the other. Both make you a champion with whom preppies want to play and spend time.

  Let’s look at Andy Roddick, a talented tennis player who’s been ranked in the top ten of men’s singles players for the last ten years and has the fastest recorded serve in the sport. It was during the 2005 Rome Masters tournament, played on clay, that Roddick was in the quarterfinals match against Fernando Verdasco of Spain. With a triple match point and the victory within reach, the umpire called a double fault against Verdasco. Roddick walked up to the umpire and told him he thought Verdasco’s ball had landed in, not outside, the court. He didn’t have to do that. Verdasco rebounded and won the match. Andy Roddick will always be remembered for this honorable move. (And, little children, you see what happened because of his good sportsmanship? Andy Roddick ended up marrying the model on the cover of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue. That’s called “karma.”)

  Tennis is full of good sports: Pancho Gonzalez, Arthur Ashe, Virginia Wade, Billie Jean King, Stefan Edberg, and Roger Federer all come to mind. These are not people who pump their fists in the air and scream “AWRIGHT!” when they win a crucial point or match. These are real-life heroes who congratulate their opponents, and when they lose, they lose with valor. Although Rafael Nadal sometimes wears terrible tennis clothes, he has good manners, and he is real. When Nadal loses, he praises his victor.

  We’ve all seen Roger Federer cry from time to time. He has cried publicly in joy and in pain. There is nothing wrong or unpr
ep about it. Competing alone in a stadium while the world watches is high pressure, high stakes, incredibly stressful. No one is asking a great athlete to suppress his or her real feelings. However, when John McEnroe (whose reputation has been revived as a great commentator) screams at an umpire or at the crowd, or when Jimmy Connors throws his racquet, or when Andy Murray gloats in victory, or when Novak Djokovic sulks between points, it is very bad—for them, and for tennis.

  Preppies no longer own tennis. The sport regains popularity with the people depending on the allure of its champions. Even when the players show grace on the court, the fans can leave a lot to be desired. Screaming, trying to jinx players mid-serve, cheering—this is all new and often rude. It is nice to applaud a win. It is not nice to applaud a loss.

  It is not entirely your fault if you’ve grown up in an etiquette wasteland. These days when you offer a sincere “thank you,” you are apt to hear “no prob” or “sure” or worse, “no worries.” Who was worried? Waiters or—here it is—waitpersons like to ask you if “you’re still working on that” salad/meal/drink, when they seem more than anything eager to clear your plates and glasses.

  In general, today people push and shove and complain, are insanely impatient, and make too much noise, and we haven’t even mentioned the Cell Phone. Yet.

  Where to begin? The cell phone, which has brought so much independence to so many middle schoolers, has created a kind of noise pollution that has broken down civilized society.

  Waiting at the post office. Sitting in a waiting room. While the proctor is explaining the rules before the SATs. At the shoe department of Saks. At jury duty. In Starbucks. As the lights dim at the theater. In (small and enclosed) elevators, where only Verizon works, anyway. At your son’s cello recital. And always on the street. And when we can’t see the little gizmo attached to your head—you are walking with an earpiece and appear to be talking loudly to yourself—we think you are mental. They’ve been around a long time, but we still think it.

  Why is it that nice people forget how publicly—not to mention loudly—they are broadcasting private content? Yes, you’re afraid you are in a no-reception gulag, but must we remind you how we overheard about Jock’s mysterious six-hour disappearance, which coincided with an unexplained hotel charge while waiting for Caroline in the foyer of ballet school? (There are places you can talk without seven other mothers listening in.) If little Greggy has Fifth Disease, do you want to hear it at the hair salon where you have to shout to his doctor over the roar of the hair dryers? And if there are no seats on the 9 pm flight to Geneva on Thursday and your reservations at the Palace Hotel in Gstaad (which you struggled to get) start on Friday, well, is it necessary for everyone around you in the restaurant to hear that? Perhaps you think someone at the surrounding tables will feel sorry for you and give you his plane reservations?

  One unintended consequence of public cell phone abuse is that it makes everyone around you feel invisible. We cannot shut off our hearing (perhaps those with hearing aids can and do), so we find ourselves in the uncomfortable position of eavesdropping. We weren’t going to mention it, but we were at the Four Seasons that night that Jock was AWOL and that woman was carrying a briefcase—an old Mark Cross one, if memory serves. (It’s too bad they went out of business, isn’t it?) And it might have been a business meeting after all, but since you brought it up, we’ll have to call Kate and see if she knows anything; her husband, Carlson, works with Jock. Soon the whole firm will know about the $565 bill, and why couldn’t Jock drive home late when it was not snowing that hard? And doesn’t the firm keep a pied-à-terre in the city for just these circumstances?

  We digress.

  You are cleared for takeoff, and just as you are about to turn off your BlackBerry, your phone comes to life, throbbing with “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)” and a picture of Louisa, who just seconded you for the garden club. You reflexively say hello, oblivious to the inappropriateness of this conversation. Even if your phone is set to vibrate (which on most instruments is a highly audible and annoying buzz), you have to resist temptation. Be strong, Phillipa! Be patient, Ned, and listen to your voice mail later.

  Please choose a ringtone that at least won’t offend the Dean of Admissions if you are caught during an interview. (This should be your basic barometer for life.) When in doubt, keep the basic tone that came on your phone.

  Taxi drivers—when they are in mid-conversation—are kind enough to pick up passengers. No matter what language they speak, cabbies in the United States are not held to looser standards than noncommercial drivers. Maybe they can be on one long phone call all day where they come from (Quince’s theory) but not here. (The same applies to you if you are driving a group to your fifth reunion.)

  And finally, everyone who is in possession of a mobile phone has committed faux pas with them. Everyone! What of the pocket dialer who inadvertently places a call to Bronson while describing Bronson’s new date to a friend? What of the text or e-mail that was the result of a drunken mistaken “SEND”? Needless to say, once sent, nothing can be unsent. It lives on in cyberspace forever and ever, and your inebriated joke can become a perpetual social liability.

  Texting is quick. It can convey information in a neutral way. You can send a helpful “Running late” text that will be understood and appreciated. You can send a text that says, “Bobby’s here. He looks amazing. Come over ASAP!!!!!!!!” But what of the couple at a restaurant dinner who are sitting in silence as they text, scroll, and write? Is this what has happened to the art of conversation? People who are addicted to their thingies cannot quite convince us that they wouldn’t prefer reading a text to anything else in the world. We are made to feel as if we are always in competition with it. Indeed, texting (and its dirty cousin, “sexting”) are eroding our capacities for charm, wit, good listening, and spelling. And that means U. (Do not dare LOL!)

  The call is from an 800 number.

  You are in a doctor’s waiting room.

  You are at a job interview.

  The caller is in the room with you.

  You just took a call from this person.

  You just took a call from this person, and now this person is in the room with you.

  We like to hide our heads in the sand and pretend nothing’s changed since Scott met Zelda at that dance. But now we are in the throes of several twenty-first-century phenomena that are hard to escape. One of the worst is oversharing.

  Those things that used to be taboo—and rightly so—are now enticements to grab fame at any cost. This insatiable desire for attention comes at the price of devaluing accomplishment, merit, and civility. It arrived in the thin arms of Paris Hilton, we think. Notoriety and achievement have been thrown into the Cuisinart of the media and blended together until what? Until Amy Winehouse blogs about Al Gore? Until Courtney Love announces she’s in love with Nelson Mandela? (She hasn’t yet, has she?) Nowadays, one can be famous for the discovery of a sex tape, the spending of shareholders’ money on prohibitively expensive office furnishings, or an affair with a sports star. Stop the presses. This flies in the face of all things prep.

  Add to that the paradigm of the cheating politician confessing and apologizing to his constituents (and oh, yeah, his family), and no one can keep a secret any longer. Not all of everyone’s mistakes are our beeswax. Sometimes they should be left between husband and wife.

  Visit the blogosphere, and what do you find? Anger and resentment. People airing their dirty laundry and IMs, sexts, and tweets looking for attention. This bully pulpit is wearying. A kind of opinionated clutter, as well, not to mention a great waste of time.

  Not to sound like prudes, but preppies are averse to all this openness. You can’t have a private life if your life isn’t private. You can’t be discreet if you have a press agent. (And press agent is not a career that attracts an abundance of preppies.)

  The shame, really, is that shame and embarrassment, our judgment’s natural security guards, seem to be on a long coffee break. Lu
ckily, preppies are still hugely capable of embarrassment; all we have to do is think of our stern old headmaster or headmistress, and we’re practically a puddle. We never fail to remember the times we were caught passing that note in French class, or the time people laughed at you in A Midsummer Night’s Dream because your fly was open, or the way we dressed ourselves for our Junior Dance. With mortification like that lingering in our memories, we tend to be better behaved than you would think. People would do well to imitate our appreciation of shame. It keeps us on the up-and-up.

  And now, for something completely different: Fun.

  You might be surprised that with all our lamenting about sharing, oversharing, mortification, and guilt we could say that we miss fun, but we do. Real fun is creative—Fulco di Verdura (see) thought up all kinds of costume parties with his friends, and they had fun. Truman Capote’s black- and-white ball honoring Katharine Graham was fun. Dressing up wasn’t the only fun to be had, but once upon a time, preppies could enjoy themselves in a more unaffected way. They could throw themselves into the fun of a house party without worrying about how the market would close on Friday afternoon. Or they could go to the theater with friends without their cell phone on silent and one eye glued to it because their two-year-old had the croup and they had to be able to leave at a moment’s notice. There was a sense of abandon and adventure. Now everyone is too serious, or has an early morning or a report to read before bed. We have become boring. We need to make more fun. And we should be able to laugh our heads off and enjoy ourselves without overdoing the booze, the chemicals, or the scandals.