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 纽约上只角的另类土豪，IMHO 第一页 |
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纽约上只角的另类土豪，IMHO 第一页 -- ceo/cfo - (4628 Byte) 2015-5-28 周四, 02:17 (2525 reads) |
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作者：ceo/cfo 在 生活风情 发贴, 来自【海归网】 http://www.haiguinet.com
“Especially if he’s a boy,” Martin says. “It’s to give him a leg up on his grapple motor skills and help him with his ‘sillies’ so he can sit still in school and do better on tests. Some people really need the occupational therapists. I’m not putting anybody down.”
Martin says she knows of mommies who hire food coaches for picky little eaters. “You need to hire somebody to teach your kid to ride a bike the safe, right way. Taking your kid to school is not enough. Helping with homework is not enough. There are homework tutorials for parents — we’re supposed to literally go to classes so you can learn how your child is learning math, so that you can be in a better mind-meld with your child.”
And then there are the extracurricular play dates, as crucial for the mommies as the children. “Parents try to raise their status and build relationships through their children,” Martin says.
“There’s a lot of social jockeying through play dates.”
As an Upper East Side arriviste, scheduling play dates for her boy became Martin’s own Everest. “I was a play-date pariah,” she says. As a new female coming into a group, she was a threat. The other mommies, she says, ignored her emails and texts looking for play dates.
Martin decided to confront them, as politely as possible. “One time, I was sitting at a table with a bunch of women, and I said, ‘OK, whose kid is available to play with my kid on Tuesday?’ ” Martin recalls. “And they all looked away from me like I had embarrassed myself. I realized: I have to do something about this. I have to learn how to work this dominance hierarchy.”
Martin did what female chimps and baboons do: She submitted to the dominant female — in this case, a woman known as the Queen of the Queen Bees — by following her lead in ways large and small. Martin began taking classes at Physique 57, a posh Pilates/ballet-barre studio that charges $4,000 per year. She got blonder and tanner. She bought designer clothes in conservative cuts.
She found herself, she says, “going native.” She wanted to belong among the Upper East Side mommies who hired stylists and makeup artists for school drop-off and pickup, who got preventive Botox every three months, who perfected the flawless facade.
“The young downtown mom with the choppy hair and big plans was gone,” she writes. “I started to get a weekly blowout, upped my sunblock to tinted moisturizer, and added pinkish lip balm to the mix. I found myself wanting a Birkin, and a Barbour jacket, and whimsical emerald-green velvet Charlotte Olympia flats with kitten faces on them.”
Martin says she recently heard from a friend in the fashion industry who had taken a rare trip to the Upper East Side. “He saw this phalanx of black Escalades parked three feet deep,” she says, “and these super-fashionable women posing and walking and he was like, ‘Oh, my God, something’s going on at Fashion Week that I don’t know about — what is this?’ It was school drop-off.”
Martin had her own capitulation to Upper East Side fashion. In her early days, she was walking along East 79th Street when a woman toting a Birkin bag deliberately swiped her with it — on an otherwise empty street.
“Something about these arrogant women, who pushed and crowded me like I didn’t exist, made me want a beautiful, expensive bag,” Martin writes. “Like a totem object, I believed, it might protect me from them.”
Birkins range in price from $10,500 to $150,000. Martin became more determined when a friend’s mother told her she had seen the wife of a super-famous New York comedian throw a hissy fit at Hermes until she got the Birkin she wanted.
So Martin’s husband agreed to buy her one: a 35-centimeter bag with black leather and gold hardware. (A used version goes for up to $30,000.)
“It was a total buy-in,” Martin says. “I just said, ‘You know what? Screw you. You’re not gonna run me off the sidewalk anymore, or be nasty to me at play group.’ I wanted to win! What did I want?
“Some play dates for my son and myself some friends.”
As Martin assimilated, the other women began to share their own insecurities. Most of them were highly educated, yet had given up their careers to tend to their homes, their children and their husbands — and the husbands were almost never around, working late or off on business trips.
These women lived in fear of their husbands cheating or leaving them, and since they didn’t have careers or money of their own, they had no leverage. “There’s this prevailing ethos of tense perfectionism and economic dependency,” Martin says. “The men have more power than they do. It is a very traditionally gender-scripted society.”
Martin saw many in her circle self-medicate with pills, pot, wine and vodka. Some mommies serve wine at 11 a.m. play dates. Ativan, Valium and Xanax are used for sleep aids. “The women I knew took them in the middle of the night,” Martin writes, “when they woke up with their hearts pounding, panicking about schools or money or whether their husbands were faithful.”
One of Madison Avenue’s most popular spots, she writes, is the AA meeting held in the church between Ralph Lauren and Prada. Problems such as alcoholism and anxiety, however, are rarely discussed.
“It’s not just that people are proud,” Martin says. “The Upper East Side is a place where one must not lose face — that would be a tragedy. That’s everything.”
Since finishing her book, Martin has heard from several Upper East Side refugees. “There are many people who have said, ‘Oh, my God, we lived there, it was so over the top.’ But, you know, there are suburbs like the Upper East Side. There are Park Avenues all over the country. But I did feel how skewed it was.”
Today, Martin and her family live on the Upper West Side. They moved several years ago, when her youngest son, now 7, was accepted to school there. It wasn’t a difficult decision, though Martin has yet to go native there.
“It’s so different,” Martin says. “Upper East Side is immaculate and conservative and clean, and this is left-of-center, dirty, progressive. The Upper East Side is skinny; the West doesn’t care about the last 10 pounds. The Upper East is totally manicured and coiffed, and this is, like, post-menopausal gray hair . . . Let me tell you: I’m sorry, but I miss the Upper East Side.”
This article previously appeared at NYPost.com.
作者：ceo/cfo 在 生活风情 发贴, 来自【海归网】 http://www.haiguinet.com
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