Oh, pity the poor Washington insiders – the poor loves, how they suffer:
Tightening the Beltway, the Elite Shop Costco
[…]
Entertaining in Washington has gone decidedly casual. No one has stepped in to duplicate Pamela Harriman’s or Katharine Graham’s elegant soirees, and the Iranian Embassy, which once served free-flowing Champagne and caviar, is long shuttered. “There used to be so many black-tie dinners at private homes,” said Buffy Cafritz, an honorary Kennedy Center trustee who also is known in Washington hostess circles. “Now everything is so much more informal, and we serve meatloaf instead of beef Wellington.”
[…]
Against the backdrop of an unpopular war, rising oil prices and a subprime mortgage crisis, a certain thriftiness seems to have crept into the city’s dining rooms.
“I don’t think anyone would dare serve caviar as a first course today, and instead of filet mignon, there are a lot of other beef dishes,” said Letitia Baldrige, the etiquette writer who was Jacqueline Kennedy’s social secretary. “Embassies don’t have the pocketbooks they used to. And to have these opulent menus for these parties here, it looks bad.”
In that sense, catering by Costco is a style statement, like drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon beer.
The Washington Post, reporting without any apparent irony on the new trend for multimillionaire DC insiders – shopping at big box stores, in the hope of not finding themselves up against a strictly metaphorical Georgetown wall should the strictly metaphorical revolution come.
No doubt the grandees are sniffing the revolutionary ire of the betrayed middle and working classes on the wind, hence their ostentatious poormouthing of themselves. It’s highly amusing that the article is illustrated with a picture of former arriviste media party girl turned DC social grande dame Sally Quinn, wife of former post editor Ben Bradlee, hardly one of the new poor.
bjacques
November 29, 2007 at 5:29 amHey, I met one of the Cafritzes once. Nice guy. Worked as a submissive waiter at La Nouvelle Justine, an S/M-themed restaurant in NYC. The Eastern Seaboard is a small town.
Watergate was the WaPo’s hour of glory. Happily, Robert Woodward made up for it by pimping Bush, while Carl Bernstein did his bit by being a jerk to Nora Ephron (hence the movie “Heartburn”).
Palau
December 4, 2007 at 8:14 amA submissive waiter? What, like on hands and knees being used as a coffee table? Heh.
The Ephron thing I was well up on at the time, there’s noting like a good bit of juicy gossip and that was a good bit of juicy gossip
Of course Bernstein’s mistress at the time was Labour grandee Baroness Jay, daughter of former PM James Callahan (and ennobled by him) and then wife of Peter Jay, the BBC’s chief Washington political correspondent. Small town indeed.
IIRC Ephron accused Jay of having hideous huge feet. Or was that said by someone else about Lady Antonia Fraser when she was knocking off Harold Pinter? I forget… so many Ugandan discussons, so little time…