I work for a research/consulting/publishing company that specializes in corporate sponsorships. [link]

ChiKat, I wish I was kidding, too.

To be fair, "trophy wife" is a little different from "arm candy wife," especially in D.C. The trophy wife should have a master's degree and a job paying a six-figure salary, as well as being size four and blonde. The arm candy just needs to be pretty.

When the fam and I were in West Virginia we noticed that it wasn't the first question at ALL and almost never came up.

I noticed that when I was on the west coast. The only people who asked were the ones who seemed genuinely interested -- it wasn't a reflex, like it is here.

(This is sad, but I love my city.)

When a friend of mine was doing an unpaid internship at the American Repertory Theatre here in Cambridge (MA), she noticed immediately that the well-off interns would immediately ask each other "Where did you board?"

DC-socialising. I'd forgotten that the other exists.

Ah. I think I'd love to be a fly on the wall at a few DC gatherings, but I'm very glad I don't have to play there.

the genteel poor stayed in Europe or got taken over by sprawling suburban mess and the deserving poor are still around, there is just no profit in them so they get no coverage - they need better press agents. Their image is all tied up in Oprah books and in the case of women, Lifetime movies.

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.

I'm still amazed at how clueless I was about practically all the realities of the working world when I was a student at--what were we calling them?--One of The Many Right Colleges. The information was all there for me to take through internships, the career planning office, etc., but since I didn't know the impressions I'd picked up from my isolated little Alabama town were wronger than a wrong thing, I didn't get slapped in the face by reality until I was a senior in the middle of a job search.

what ever happened to the concept of the deserving poor? It's as if poverty has become a symptom of laziness and moral depravity, rather than something that can easily happen to the non-wealthy when the job goes at the same time that the medical bills come.

I wonder if that's cyclical, actually.

Yeah, whatever happened to genteel poverty anyway?

The genteel poor learned to work for a living. If they're really genteel, they work at nonprofits or universities or art galleries. If not, they end up middle-class and take their family heirlooms to Antiques Roadshow.

For that matter, what ever happened to the concept of the deserving poor? It's as if poverty has become a symptom of laziness and moral depravity

This is a foreseeable effect of the pervasive myth of social mobility. If "obviously" anybody who works hard enough can get ahead, then anybody who does not get ahead didn't work hard enough. It is a logical fallacy clean and pure enough to use in rhetoric classes. Alas that many people would not know the word "fallacy" if it jumped up and mugged them.

Well, FWIW, he was a very nice and chatty guy, even to so lowly a person as the front desk receptionist, and he never came to the office so I have no idea what he looked like.

Yaz was famously warm and friendly with the fans. Hence, his longstanding popularity.

Except for those from DC. Substitue "money" with "power" and you're spot on.

Somebody once made a documentary about limousine culture in NYC, DC and LA and how they each meant different things. NYC = money, DC = power, LA = celebrity. Kind of obvious, but still interesting to realize that there are different "currencies" in different cultures.

Completely and utterly uninteresting to people once they ascertained that I was not a lobbyist or something.

During the dot-com boom, I attended a party thrown to celebrate the opening of Alexa. I wore a namecard listing my current employer, an investment bank.

You never SAW conversations end so fast as when I explained that I was a technical writer, not an analyst. I was bearing The Dreaded Production-Class Cooties.