Last week, we attended a dinner party in which one of the guests told a story. She was telling us about being at another function, one that was hosted and attended by a bunch of really rich people. As a sort of parlor game, the hostess asked each diner to tell the rest of the guests what they were going to give up for the recession.
Obviously, there’s something distasteful about this. I imagined people, tanned from a recent vacation in the Barbados, sipping wine and eating expensive cakes bought from some fancy bakers. They had probably been talking about how expensive it was to send their kids to UCC. This, of course, was the point of the person at our dinner party was making. For the wealthy people she was talking about, the recession was an abstraction, and whatever deprivation they were suffering was self-imposed, and not borne of uncontrollable circumstance. For instance, one woman responded by saying,“ Well, this year the hunt will be very, very different….”
This made us all feel kind of smug, like we were in touch with the real world, and not these other people, but that wasn’t true. All of us, sitting around the table, were privileged, too, I think, and this sparked a heated conversation, but I wasn’t really listening, as I was trying to figure out what sort of hunt the woman had been speaking of. At first, I thought of a foxhunt, but then I decided that it must have been an Easter Egg hunt. It would take place at an estate, and there would be hundreds of guests, each one dressed up as if for the Kentucky Derby, and the grand prize for the person who collected the most eggs would be a weekend in New York.