I couldn`t social-climb my way out of a paper bag. But now that I`m moving up in the world, I need a crash course in p`s and q`s.
Before dinner parties I always worry: What if they serve soup with chopsticks? What do you do? Or what if they make puree of brains with magnolia blossoms? Help, Ma!
So it was with the dinner party at Tara Tibbits` house. Tara invited me because her friend, the New York editor, was coming to town. He wanted to meet me. This was very flattering, but also terrifying.
I didn`t know Tara very well, other than that she was some kind of professional tastemaker. When I arrived, I found that everything in her house was a work of art.
I dared not sit down for fear of breaking the antique metal park bench that was covered with Christmas lights or the backless, couchlike thing or the 250-year-old chair. So I just stood in the middle of the room-on stage.
All I knew about the editor was that he is a terrific writer and that his wife is a curator at a museum in Manhattan. Five hundred unemployed Ph.D`s in art history spend their spare time daydreaming of murdering this woman.
But as the evening progressed, I came to see that just because the editor was a smart New Yorker, that didn`t mean that somewhere in the distant past there wasn`t a link between our lives. He had gone to summer camp in the `50s with Bobby Binstock, son of the rabbi at Temple Sholom on Lake Shore Drive in Chicago. Why didn`t he say so in the first place?
Just when I was starting to feel at ease playing Jewish trivia games, the beer was served. Tara poured it into enormous goblets, like wine glasses but scaled up to hold a whole bottle of beer. When I took a sip, I realized I was staring at the distinguished editor through the glass darkly while the beer foam went all over my face.
Another guest-a Chinese chef-cooked up a duck that tasted like a Hershey bar melted on a barbecued rib. But then the moment I`d been dreading: How to eat the crab with chopsticks?
I watched as, one by one, the editor, the chef and Tara the tastemaker put down their chopsticks and ripped those saucy claws open with their bare hands.
Yeah! All right! Let`s get down, I thought. But I didn`t say it.
By the time the tea came in the little, round Bauhaus-kinda teacups with the handle that felt as if you were holding Pinocchio`s nose, I started to relax. These were just plain folks. They eat. They sleep. They chomp on claws.
