15 Things I'm Desperately Convinced I Need This Week

I bought this book earlier this week, and let me tell you - it is nuts! 

Author Stephen Birmingham's dissection of what he classifies as 'Real Society' is too savage, hilarious, and at times uncomfortably classist not to become immediately enthralled.

I have already learned so much from its incredibly pompous pages. 

As a teaser sure to catch your attention, I offer you the below passage:

In Philadelphia recently, a matron was exclaiming to a visitor over the great supply of books and plays that have been written about the Philadelphia social scene - Kitty Foyle, The Philadelphia Story, and more recently, Richard Powell's The Philadelphian. The visitor commented that he, personally - as an outsider - had found parts of Mr. Powell's novel hard to credit. "Oh, really?" said the lady eagerly. "So did I. Tell me what it was that bothered you." The visitor cited the opening section of the book, which centers about a Philadelphia Society wedding. As readers of the novel will remember, when the fictional bride and groom have settled in their wedding-night rooms at the Bellevue-Stratford, the bride makes the belated discovery that her husband is impotent. In her distress, she runs out of the hotel into Broad Street where, walking in the opposite direction, she encounters a burly construction worker whom she has eyed admiringly in the past. He is drunk, and walking arm in arm with a prostitute. In the convenient darkness, the young bride pays off the prostitute and takes the arm of the construction worker, who does not notice the artful substitution. The bride and her new beau now proceed to a handy shed where their union is consummated. (And, in the best tradition of modern fiction, where one encounter guarantees a pregnancy, the young woman nine months later gives birth to the child who becomes the novel's hero.) Meanwhile, back at the Bellevue-Stratford, the young bridegroom is so distraught at his wife's discovery that he, too, races off into the night in a fast sports car and is killed in a hideous accident, thereby easing things considerably for his wife's future. all this, said the visitor, "I simply found impossible to believe." "I completely agree," said the Philadelphia lady quickly. "It's absurd. Nobody would ever spend their wedding night at the Bellevue-Stratford."

The Right People: A Portrait of the American Social Establishment, $17.95