personal favoriteâwhen Adam and Eve eat forbidden fruit, they are punished by having to wear fancy party clothes. Then we all sing songs, while sitting on the floor holding on to our squirming children, and wonder how we can possibly stand up again since our legs have gone to sleep.
There is an order to how the parents and children sit in chapel. The billionaires sit along the front sides of the room. They tend to be cooler than the rest of us and usually have only one parent in attendance. They donât have to care if anyone likes them so they donât show up just to be seen. The billionaires rarely wear business suits and seem to know itâs all right to have a wife with a little paunch. They have hired enough help to insulate them from the annoying millionaire parents who are pining for a playdate. Instead they have their kids play with either fellow billionaire offspring or the full-scholarship kids, of which there are three. They seem genuinely enchanted by their children.
In the front of the chapel sit a group that Bruce, who used to hail from this land of exclusion, calls the âPA Ladies,â the not-employed-out-of-the-house, Park Avenue mothers. The school thinks PA stands for âparents association.â These are the wives of the millionaires who want to hang with the billionaires. They feel the need to have two adults frame their three-foot kid and they work the crowd like a networking slam. They titter back and forth with their grown-up friends while insisting their kids remain quiet, making a low-level noise thatâs distracting. They give their children the names of expired ancestors such as Baxter, Ford, and Wyeth. Not coincidentally, some are also the names of New York Stock Exchange companies. Their men wear sharp suits and smell good, and their women wear triple-ply cashmere tops tossed over super-tight low-riding jeans. Their abdominals that occasionally peek from beneath their sweaters reveal nothing about having had multiple children because they only stay pregnant for eight months, induce early, have a Victoriaâs Secret C, which is the cesarean combined with a tummy tuck, before returning to their two-hour daily workouts. Their shoes tend to be expensive, with delicate high heels that rarely hit pavement, and they have jewelry usually purchased from each other. They are the peer group of my coworkersâ wives and they look at me either with pity for not marrying one of their tribe or with what I believe is the bad-mother glare, like they know something about my kids that I donât. It doesnât help that my daughterâs contribution to the âWhose Mommy Am I?â bulletin board contains a drawing of a straggly haired lady with text transcribed from her mouth stating, âMy mommy only likes to read the Wall Street Journal. â The other darlingsâ pictures state, âMy mommy reads Donât Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus! â or â Goodnight Moon. â Who is that sucky mommy who only reads the Journal ? Needless to say, we donât socialize too much.
Toward the back of the room are the working schlumpsâthe oddballs, including me and three other moms in business wear. We tote oversized bags with electronic gear all set to silence. We sit on the carpeted floor with the most difficulty, given the way we are dressed, and we try our hardest to not check our phones during chapel time. We donât necessarily want to hang with the billionaires but wouldnât mind living like them.
The other parent type that sits with us are the one-offs. Thereâs one jock mom clad in spandex who pushes a double stroller from somewhere far away and begins each day looking exhausted. There is the token overweight mother who wears orthopedic sandals with socksâeither a woman completely comfortable in her own skin, or someone who has totally waved the white flag of surrender. Who can compete with this crowd? Also with us sit two former
Cathy Glass
Lindsay McKenna
The Wyrding Stone
Erich Maria Remarque
Erle Stanley Gardner
Glen Cook
Eileen Brennan
Mireya Navarro
Dorothy Cannell
Ronan Cray