The Past Isn't Dead
It isn't even true.
Helllloooo Scam Fam!!
How I've missed you! I know, the sentiment is mutual. How are we feeling about 2020? Fresh as daisies, better than ever, and not at all disappointed by how the squeaky clean slates we woke up with on January 1 have since been filled with contents suspiciously similar to whatever was sloppily scrawled on them in the twentyteens?
I don't think I have to tell you that turning the page on a calendar is hardly the magic spell we need to transform our lives into plastic wrapping on a straight-from-the-factory-floor appliance crossed with new-car smell all tucked safely into the crevices of an uncracked paperback spine. (Though I did do an unofficial version of the Polar Bear Plunge in Coney Island on New Year’s Day, and it was a glorious rebirth.) Starting over requires will and determination. Unless you painstakingly orchestrate it, no one lets you sever yourself from your past.
But that doesn't mean you can't give it a shot. Faith Hope Consolo did. The first thing to know about Faith Hope Consolo is that she's dead. The second thing to know is that many people who knew her while she was alive apparently considered her to be an unreliable narrator and liked her anyway. The third thing to know and reason we're talking about her here is that New York Times is salty she controlled certain questionably relevant segments of her own narrative.
She Was a Star of New York Real Estate, but Her Life Story Was a Lie, goes the headline. The first part is verifiably true. She negotiated leases with Cartier, Zara, and Ivanka Trump™, and while I am mystified by the intricacies of commercial real estate, I trust that this is all very impressive.
So let's get to that lie of a life story. Here's the outline of what appeared in her obituary when she died at the end of 2018 at the age of 73:
Ms. Consolo was born into the business, benefiting from her father’s legacy as a real estate executive. Emboldened professionally by her mother, a child psychiatrist, Ms. Consolo parlayed her privileged Connecticut upbringing, which included a stint at Miss Porter’s School for Girls and a degree from Parsons Paris, into a bold career, socializing and cutting deals with the moneyed classes she knew so well.
Very little of that is factual. She claimed to have been born in Shaker Heights, Ohio, but was actually from Cleveland. She said she grew up in Westport, Conn. but it was the outer edges of Brooklyn. Her mother was not a child psychiatrist, but a hairdresser at a department store. And the kicker: "Frank Consolo was not a real estate executive, but a career criminal who did stints in Alcatraz and at the federal penitentiary in Leavenworth, Kan."
For the life of me, I can't imagine why anyone might not readily share that story. It's not as if we live in a world where it's legal to discriminate against people with criminal records or where wealth is equated with and celebrated as virtue or where one can inherit one's parents' reputations. Personally, when I watched Mad Men and Don Draper would get drunk and respond to a question about cereal by telling a client that he wished was his dad that he’d been born in a brothel, I would yell at the screen, “Preach, sis! The truth will set you free!”
"No one in the financial press," writes Julia Satow in the Times, "from Crain’s to The New York Times to The Wall Street Journal to Fox Business, seemed to have an inkling that Ms. Consolo was anything other than as she presented herself." Maybe that's because she wasn't in any consequential way. What part of where someone went to high school is essential to understanding them when they die at the age of 73? Is it possible her accomplishments are even “realer” since they aren’t simply the door prize for being born to a real estate mogul father?
To quote Bob Dylan, #FactsMatter. So do harm and consequences. Consolo lied about how much money her parents had, not her ability to make money off of a jewelry line owned by the future first daughter. A more accurate headline might have been, “We Wrote About a Professional Woman’s Parentage for Some Reason and We Got the Details Wrong.”
The problem with fresh starts is that no one, least of all the fit-to-print New York Times, wants you to be great. I mean, I do. It's all I want for you. I long to see you out here ✨T H R I V I N G✨, as the Instagram caption goes.
So if you need someone to verify your attendance at an institution that charges a cool $60k a year or to corroborate all the time you spent summering in the Hamptons as a child or to pretend to be your dad while your dad is incarcerated, I got u.
Happy 2020, let's get our money.
Ruthie
My Week+ in Consumption
I went to the paperback launch of Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments by Saidiya Hartman at PS1. The whole event was sick, but since you can't turn back time and attend with me, maybe just read the book because it's sensational?
And if you like my reading suggestions and haven't been studiously memorizing every single title I recommend in this space, I made a list of my favorite books I read last year. (Included my least favs too because we all love drama.)
The new Philly Pretzel Factory is open in downtown Brooklyn. I am not that impressed with the quality — got some real Super Pretzel vibes off the ones I ate, and the real red flag is that they're detached at the sides — but it's still basically better than any NYC soft pretzel I'm familiar with.
Watchmen isn’t for everyone, but it sure was for me!
JR: Chronicles at the Brooklyn Museum is accessible and engaging, and I found it mind-expanding and super, super cool.
After three years of consideration, I pulled the trigger on a pair of Red Wings, and I couldn’t be more pleased.