Scam Fam,
Let’s talk about a real bummer of a topic: Adulthood. I personally lack some classic trappings of adult life (spouse, kids, temperance, any kind of regular system for laundry) but have either begrudgingly accepted or embraced others (steady employment, autopayment for monthly bills, early bedtime, freedom to eat cheese and nothing else for dinner if I feel like it). I was the kind of kid who always wanted to be a grownup, and so it was quite shocking for me when, at the legally adult age of 21, I saw the Nicole Holofcener movie Friends With Money.
(Now is where I should note that I've seen this movie exactly once, a long time ago, and I've barely had five minutes this week to stare into my phone with the dead eyes of a Kardashian let alone rewatch a 13-year-old indie for purposes of quoting it accurately in a newsletter I write for free. It's possible everything you're about to read is factually incorrect! Call the cops if you have a problem with that.)
In my recollection of Friends With Money, Frances McDormand's character unravels for reasons that are mostly mysterious to her friends and family and the viewer, but increasingly uncomfortable to watch. She gets embarrassingly confrontational in department stores and parking lots; she stops bathing. When someone (maybe her husband?) finally asks her why she isn't washing her hair, she says, “What’s the point? It just gets dirty.” Then she says something along the lines of how she'd been waiting for years for her actual life — the good one — to start and doesn't understand why it hasn't happened yet.
At 21, I was about to graduate from an expensive private college in New England (not a euphemism for Harvard; I went to Brown, not that that's any better) for which my family had paid my full tuition. I don't think you need to tell me what that kind of school is like, but just in case, for me, it was a cushy reality simulation designed to make me believe I was an adult doing adult things that ~mAttEReD~ while simultaneously minimizing my actual responsibility for anything and tending to my every need. I loved it.
Still, for various reasons, mostly involving being bored and restless, but also including the fact that I'd spent a fair amount of time in school learning about how my comfort was a direct result of white supremacy and capitalism (I also learned that in America, those are often synonyms) and it came at the expense of the subjugation, exploitation, and general disadvantaging of people and populations my reality simulation was structured to exclude and make invisible to me, I was pretty desperate to graduate and start a new chapter!
So imagine my surprise upon learning that in several decades, I might find myself wandering a supermarket with dirty hair, berating strangers, waiting for my actual life to begin. Until that moment, I assumed that at some point in the very near future my actual life would begin, and everything about my experience that had been disappointing or dull or anything less than exactly the way I wanted it to be would suddenly turn to glittering perfection. In turn, everything about myself that I loathed would become virtue and light and also I would be a lot hotter. I understood this wouldn't happen instantly — I wasn't stupid — but it had simply never occurred to me that it might not happen by the time I was whatever age Frances McDormand was in 2006. Or that it might not happen at all.
Don’t worry, it did. My life is perfect and I love everything about it, especially how Scams Rule Everything Around Me ; )
The only other part of Friends With Money that I remember is something Jennifer Aniston's character says. She's playing a deadbeat in a medium-successful attempt to wash the likability of Rachel Green off of her (sorry, Jen, unlike Justin, I will always love you just the way you are). I think her character’s romantically involved with Jack Black? Anyway, at one point one of the sad listless rich ladies is organizing some type of benefit, and Jennifer Aniston's character asks why they have to throw and attend a party, why can't they just give the money directly to charity?
It's the kind of question a teenager who recently discovered Kerouac would ask, but that doesn't make it a bad one. I think we all asked a version of it this week when we accidentally died and went to scam heaven thanks to Operation Varsity Blues. I am going to assume you know the basics of this cream puff of a scandal by now. The B-list celebs, the elitist sports, the kids on yachts, the kids smoking badly rolled blunts, the idea that the people who always get away with things get called out as criminals, the parents disparaging their own kids for whose benefit they are making six-figure bribes. I mean, what more can we ask for?
I haven't been able to devote nearly as much time as I wish to immersing myself in criminal complaints and fire takes these last few days, but on Wednesday in a doctor's waiting room I did eavesdrop on an octogenarian and her daughter discussing the finer points of college admissions policies and clowning Jared Kushner, so I feel like we all have the information we need and we can discover more at our own pace. (In approximately seven months, we'll have, like, three podcasts and a hastily edited limited series, plus a Netflix doc, and then in a decade we'll have an astonishing whatever the 2029 version of an FX series is detailing how we got the story of Operation Varsity Blues all wrong; we'll consume it while falling asleep on the battlefields of the water war.)
My first question when I heard the news is why these parents didn't just buy a building to gain their children admission the respectable way. The person I voiced this to answered correctly and wisely that $600,000 doesn't buy you a building at Yale. It's true. No one funded a building to gain me admission to Brown (to my knowledge, at least), but with a pile of money it makes me squirm to even think about so I refuse to research it but that I would guess is in the range of half a million of today's dollars, my parents sent me to private school for 13 years and paid for an SAT tutor. No one involved in that scheme was at any kind of risk of getting charged with bribery, and the people who believe we live in meritocracy don't question whether I earned my spot at the fancy college or in all the spaces to which that degree has gained me entry since. I gotta believe that if someone had decided that money was better spent on developing my water polo skills, even I, a notoriously wimpy and uncoordinated athlete, could have gotten to USC recruit level.
My point is there are a lot of ways to launder the bribe money that gets kids into college. But as Jennifer Aniston's Friends With Money character might ask, why go through all that rigamarole when you can just give it to the sailing coach?
Scam smart,
Ruthie
PS: This is not the first time TWIS has focused on college admissions and fairness (lol); you can read what I wrote about what went down at T.M. Landry here.
PPS: Thank you to Ester and Lauren O. for identifying Liane Moriarty’s literary blind item as Miss Pym Disposes by Josephine Tey. I can’t wait to read it!
My Week in Consumption: Sad, Listless Rich Lady Edition
When I moved to Brooklyn in 2006 I lived with three roommates one block from where I currently reside. We found a butcher block table and chairs in the trash on the street near the apartment(s) and took them home with us. The table and chairs had lived with me ever since until recently when, after much struggle, I sold them on Craigslist to three women who live in Bushwick for $50. I then used that crisp $50 bill (plus the change from my pockets to cover taxes) to buy this ridiculous recycling bin. I love it a lot.
I have spent so much on budget headphones that I wind up hating that it adds up to basically two pairs of nice headphones. But I still can't bring myself to buy the nice headphones because I have already spent so much on the discarded budget pairs. I know, you weep for me. Anyway, I finally found a pair of mid-priced workout earbuds I really like, congratulations to me.
While trying to have dinner in Soho recently and being turned away left and right ("the wait is about two and a half hours right now, would you like to put your name in?" is a thing a lot of good looking people can say with a straight face!), I wound up going to my favorite lunch spot, Westbourne. The menu is the exact same at dinner, and there's wine, and the lights are dim. It was GREAT.