Book Recommendation
If anyone is looking for an highly entertaining read I totally recommend they pick up a copy of Wendy Burden’s “Dead End Gene Pool”. More than just a darkly comic family memoir (Burden’s mother was an over-tanned anorexic alcoholic nymphomaniac, one of her uncles a not-so-crypto-nazi, and a flatulent grandmother who thought nothing of having her butler hold her panties for her while she stepped in to them) it’s an insiders look into a very specific chunk of American society, that is the world of the post-war East Coast Elite. And it turns out the Elite are just as dysfunctional and perverse as the rest of us, if not more so: alcoholic grandparents with a staff of 20 servants; anorexic, over-tanned, nymphomaniacal mothers, Not-so-crypto-Nazi uncles, Pedophillic kitchen staff, and step-fathers with basements full of heavy weapons. It sounds almost like my last family reunion. One detail I found interesting was even though the Burdens could afford to have fresh grouse flown in from Scotland and terrapin from Florida, their pantry was usually stocked full of ordinary kitchen items. Pepperidge farm Milano cookies, Thomas’s English Muffins, Dubonnet ($9.99 a bottle at my local liquor store) and Wild Turkey (19.99 a bottle), Lays potato chips, etc. Who knew that I could afford to eat like a Vanderbilt?
