Class is just such a weird, non-existent thing for me unless I have directed AT me.
I mean, my family was stupid wealthy in Cuba-- my mother says she remembers going into her grandmother's house in Havana with the marble floors throughout and the Goya on one wall of the foyer with a Picasso opposite it.
Yet, they lost everything except, you know, their lives-- and came over to the U.S. and started over. My mother, who'd been nun-educated and graduated high school at fifteen, went to night school at age twenty, got an American high school diploma, then went to a trade school where she learned how to become a production pattern maker. My entire childhood was filled with adults who'd been wealthy, successful professionals; doctors, lawyers, architects and when they came to this country, took any job they could, mopping floors or clerking or working in pharmacies or as fry cooks or whatever, while they learned the language and in many cases, went back to graduate school to get the degrees in this country that would allow them to resume their professional lives.
So yeah, for me, that class thing is far more tied into work ethic than anything else.
Thank you for the picture, Sue. I swear to DOG I have never seen picture hanging like that and I still can't figure out why "poor" people would be more likely to hang them that way-- that would be interesting enough to tease at in a New Youk Times article.
Also, barb-- your momn is a production pattern maker? That is a really hard/skilled job, to me, but sort of a neat one. It is one of those things that really should pay a lot but doesn't, I think.
Allyson, I'l just wish you end up with the best of transitioning, be it to a new job or a transition in boss's brain. And that whichever kind it is, it goes quickly and with as little trauma as possible.
College was the first time I really ever knew anyone who had gone to private school. Boarding school even! It seemed weird to me that one of my friends went to a boarding school that was close enough to home that she could have driven. But nope. Another also went there because her mom was the staff shrink, so she got to go for free. And lived in the dorms.
I mean, I knew theoretically plenty of people did, but from my part of the world, boarding school=NMMI, and often for punitive reasons. And private school? Well, there were Catholic ones, but most of the kids going there were there for religious reasons. The public schools were better.
Guilco was largely upper middle class, I'd guess, though some portion were not. A fair number of trust-funders. Many of the nots were definitely from the alt-world of Quakerism. Communes, a lot of the groups activist quakerism does outreach to and whatnot. I have to say, except when someone told you that they grew up nudist in the hills of Tennessee or in swiss boarding schools (seriously, I half thought that was a fictional construct!), it didn't seem like there were a lot of class issues, HOWEVER, if you went to weirdass Guilco, you probably already had a certain bent. Basically, whatever brought you there was a bigger bond than economic background was divisive.
Though I still was somewhat bemused by the girl whose dad bought her a HOUSE in town when she started her freshman year. Which she only lived in on weekends, because there was an on campus requirement. And she only saw him every couple of years.
I have a friend whose little girl was watching an old movie on television when she was 6 or 7 and said to her mother, "What was it like when everything turned colored?"
Favorite B&W story is still the one from one of my college roommates whose parents didn't want them to watch TV and had a black & white set on which they could only watch PBS. She dressed as Cookie Monster for her school Halloween party and got up on stage to have the announcer say "What a cute gorilla!" She replied "I'm Cookie Monster!" His response? "But Cookie Monster is blue!". Needless to say, she was traumatized.
Never fear msbelle, I love love love screwball comedies and still really dislike
Bringing Up Baby.
Sophia, yeah-- she's a tremendous seamstress/patternmaker/designer. Well, retired now, but back in the day, she was in demand for the work she did because she could work on evening gowns as easily as she could on sportswear. In fact, Aims and I have laughed over the fact that she introduced me to a vintage dress site and while browsing, came across a dress my mom worked on. Rose Taft was one of the companies she did work for.
And you're right. It doesn't pay anywhere near enough what it should. Although I definitely wound up with some great clothes out of it.
Ooh, what a gorgeous dress.
Jesse is right about it taking several weeks to find a job, I realize, so I better get my ass in gear.
I think you should start looking now, definitely. I keep forgetting that I have a lot of work experience now and that I'm not fresh out of college. Companies are much more willing to negotiate when they're hiring someone skilled, and if you want to remain for the symposium, you really can sell that to a new company in terms of your reliability and commitment.
I'd have bought it in a New York minute to wear except that color of green turns me a lovely shade of jaundiced. And I have other Rose Taft dresses in my closet that are actually much nicer. (One of which is my prom dress, which was lovely, even if it was bubblegum pink.)
