I was thinking more along the lines of dating/marrying

See comment about whoring -- if there was anyone in the group I actually wanted to date or marry, sure I would have. But dating or marrying with an eye to profit = whoring in my book.

or putting your MBA to use.

Never had one of those, myself.

That's pretty much my point. You weren't trying to get in.

FYI Society Balls .

there seems to be a societal agreement that this is not the case

Really? I thought it was pretty skeptically apparent he was marrying eye candy and she was marrying money. And that was societally endorsed, but I've never heard anything about how in love they are.

Jessica, your rate card... Oh, nevermind.

Gus, please don't patronize me. If you don't want to argue, fine. But this is just rude.

[eta: This topic is very close to what I do for a living. The fact that online delivery costs more than tape/DVD is a constant source of frustration, but it is nonetheless a fact of the business.]

Today's Scarlett Johanssen/Gwen Stefani/Fergie from the Roots = yesterday's Brooke Astor.

I agree, in as much as how well they're known, and/or looked up to, but as far as powerandmoney- that's still class determined.

One Of Many Rightish Colleges recently instituted a policy of offering to fund any student's unpaid summer internship, because so many of the choicest ones are unpaid.

That's awesome. I don't want to sound like poor pitiful me from a state school, here, but my career path would be very different if I had understood, at 19 or 20, that unpaid internships = connections = future jobs. It honestly never occured to me.

Has anyone posted this Onion article: U.S. Children Still Traumatized One Year After Seeing Partially Exposed Breast On TV

The funniest part is the picture of "Drawings by children who saw the Super Bowl XXXVIII halftime show."

You weren't trying to get in.

Please don't tell me what I was or was not trying to do. I told you that I do not whore myself out, but I was willing to take advantage of less tawdry angles.

It never panned out.

I just didn't realise it wasn't trying if I didn't have an MBA.

But did they read the papers and talk about the dresses and stuff? Nobody does that now.

I know my father's mother didn't. She was a tomboy who did her best to avoid anything indoors, social, or involving skirts. Which was quite a trick in the 1930s. (She helped start my dad's boy scout troup mostly because she wanted to go camping as a den mother.) And I doubt my mother's mother did, either, from what my mom tells me about her. She didn't see the point of the DAR, I doubt she would have seen the point of debutants.

They were both in Michigan. Maybe the whole debutant thing was less of an issue there. I don't remember ever hearing about that sort of thing when I was growing up, even when listening to my parents' friends talking about their childhoods. (My parents were both born in the 1920s, and their friends were of a similar cohort.)

Maria, from what little I saw of the DC scene, it was downright scary.

I use Netflix to guilt trip myself into watching movies. If I am paying for them to sit on my floor, I might as well pop them in. Lack of timeliness stops being an issue, except during times of extreme busyness/stress.