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An Ounce of Pretension

Aug23

Tennis ball and racket with broken stringI had a near-death experience today. Okay, maybe not near-death but it was definitely unpleasant déjà vu. For a few minutes, I was back in my over-privileged childhood, drowning in a sea of chic I would never achieve. Some people go into anaphylactic shock if they eat peanuts or shellfish. I am vulnerable to yuppie poisoning.

This morning I had to go to the Domain, that self-important shopping center + condos where Austin’s nouveau riche can embrace life on a reservation. Every need is at one’s fake nail-adorned fingertips. From morning latte, to nouvelle cuisine lunch, to popping into Louis Vuitton and Tiffany’s before heading for your pied-de-terre, a condo just a Cadillac-length away, you need never experience the real world. I didn’t see one this morning, but surely a funeral home is in the works.

I grew up in San Antonio, in the Hills of Terrell and the Heights of Alamo. For those of you not from around these parts, that’s where you find Lifestyles of the Rich and Shallow in San Antonio. My parents moved there to guarantee us kids a good education,  still a good reason for living in 78209. But life in ’09, as the natives call it, also guaranteed initiation into a hardcore sense of superiority I never quite bought into.

I had to go to the Dough-main this morning to get something at the only Apple store on my side of town. Actually, I was impressed. The store teemed with customers, or at least personal shoppers for wealthy clients who couldn’t be bothered. I guess if you build it at the Domain, they will come.

Dressing in my usual attire, pants, a Laurel Burch t-shirt with cats, matching LB socks–also with cats–and black canvas mary-janes, I even took a minute to put on make-up and run a brush through my hair, but the people there didn’t seem impressed. I felt I should wear a sign, “I washed me face and ‘ands before I come, I did.” Feelings of kinship with Eliza Doolittle aside, I grew itchier by the moment.

I thought of my father, a self-made man who accrued and lost several fortunes in his lifetime. (The roller coaster unfortunately ended on a down note.) He delighted in wearing khakis to the bank for a meeting or to Gildemeister’s to buy my mother an expensive piece of jewelry. It tickled him when an uninformed clerk or young banker treated him like some hobo who had strayed from his element.

Today I understood my father a little better. There is something beguiling about looking down on people who consider themselves superior. It took a few seconds to clear images of cotillions, Bass Weejuns, and Amory Oliver dance lessons out of my head, as I turned my Kia toward home, gratefully exchanging that idyll for my real life in less fashionable, friendlier digs.

One of my favorite lines from “Steel Magnolias” is, “An ounce of pretension is worth a pound of manure.” Daddy would have approved.

Welcome to the Soapbox

Aug15

Janet KilgoreI have lived a long time and hopefully learned a little something from my mistakes. I like to think I learned from the times I got it right, too. One thing I know for sure, the time between achieving wisdom and your death is fleeting. This is why so often a person’s last words are, “Well, crap!”

For several years, a friend and I shared a humor column in a county newspaper. We had a near-perfect venue for observations (rants) on any topic that struck our fancies, and our fancies were constantly under attack. I didn’t appreciate the soapbox until the editor kicked it out from under me. Seems my liberal opinions finally crossed the line and I was history. Admittedly, it didn’t take much; that line lay about two inches from my foot the whole time I wrote for them.

I took a long and torturous route to enlightenment. The first time I could vote for president was 1972, Richard Nixon’s second run for the roses. Within two years, I learned my maiden vote had been squandered on the worst kind of crook, one not smart enough to keep the fact under wraps. I remained traumatized, dubious of my ability to make an intelligent choice, and didn’t vote again for several years.

I awakened from my political sleep about twenty years ago. While I snoozed, many of my fellow citizens had moved politically slightly to the right of Attila the Hun. There was a noisy bunch in my neighborhood hell-bent on banning books at the local high school. They wanted veto power not only for their own children but for everyone else’s. Seems they thought themselves better judges than the teachers of what was age-appropriate literature for the students, even though they had not actually read any of the books in question. Figuring the next stop was a bonfire of books out on the practice football field, I stood up and fought.

I’m still fighting. The issues change along with the fractious factions, but I seem to spend ever-increasing hours fighting the barbarians at my gate. So, with my very first blog I offer you my musings and welcome you to The Soapbox.