I Want My Homeroom Teacher To Be Anisha Lakhani

Go HERE for more photos from this event from PMC.

I KNEW IT! I always said they were a different breed….Manhattan kids. I spent my summers out East with them at the Club, at tennis camp and taking sailing lessons; I was surrounded by usual suspects from top schools like Dalton, Chapin, Spence, Riverdale and Horace-Mann, to name a few. These elite kids were the offspring of power brokering financial barons, family fortune heirs, and their trophy wife admirers. I always knew that something was up with these kids from the moment they started calling me “Country Boy” because I didn’t live in Manhattan in the 10021 Zip Code. As if Greenwich Connecticut was in New Hampshire. They were different all right!

I started uncovering the secrets of the Upper East Side later in life when I read books like The Right Address and The Nanny Diaries. These books departed juicy little nuggets about the cheating husbands and their money hungry neurotic wives who shopped and benefit hopped out of desperation while stabbing their ‘friends’ in the back. However, a piece of the puzzle remained missing – what is really up with the kids? There’s got to be a story there! Turns out there is - and Anisha Lakhani’s new book Schooled shines a flashlight on those bright and shiny A earning students and the people who earn those A’s for those kids.

More story and photos below:

Schooled is a tell-all ‘fictitious’ book which chronicles Anna Taggart’s experience as a teacher-cum-tutor to these savvy kids. The term tutor in this book really means someone who is paid a high sum of money to do the homework and write papers for the kids. What would qualify Anisha to write such a book? How about being a teacher at Dalton for like 10 years. It turns out teaching wasn’t just her job; it became a field assignment to collect data which would become a super juicy book topic. Enter Schooled.

I picked the book up last night at Alice + Olivia in Southampton, where Anisha was on hand to sign the book. Also on hand, were some of Anisha’s former Dalton girls who could NOT be pumped for any information. After all, this book is ‘fiction’, as is most of the Upper East Side anyway! Some other faves were there to celebrate as well: Handsome in hats Peter Davis (freshly back from LA), Allure’s Beauty girl Victoria Kirby, stunner Lilly Schonwald who arrived in her fab new convertible, my fabulous date for the night Chau Ngo, fun and friendly PMC photog Adriel Reboh, Supper Club’s Tamsin Lonsdale and many others.

Anisha, by today’s standards, is the perfect chameleon. Beautiful, charming and witty – but most of all, clever. She roamed those halls for 10 years at Dalton as a teacher who amassed a fortune via tutoring – accumulating better accessories than an editorial assistant at Vogue. One might suspect family money since Anisha lived a lot better than your typical teacher? Perhaps it was family money of a different kind; money from the families of the kids she tutored, as the book might suggest. So she looked fabulous, lived well, shopped well as a teacher, all while collecting the story that would one day become Schooled. It makes you wonder how closely Anisha’s experience at Dalton rivals Anna Taggart’s. For that, you will need to read the book and decide for yourself.

Also, stay tuned for coverage on her NYC book party this week!!!