I rarely attend those big, fancy fund-raising events where people get all dressed up and act like honest-to-goodness adults. Of course, I rarely get invited, so it’s not entirely because of my aversion to pretentiousness that keeps me away. When I was invited to a particularly interesting event recently I made what I thought might be a life-changing decision. I would get over my fear of large crowds of people who are all more interesting and better dressed than me, and join the world of the grown-ups.
As always, when I attend functions like this one, I started out at home saying to myself, “I don’t want to go. I don’t want to go. I don’t want to go," and ended up at the event saying, “La de da, I’m so glamorous to be here!”
When I was introduced to a group who had been previously described to me as ‘the top rung of the social ladder’ I was determined to see them as ordinary people who would probably love to be my friend. Okay, so that didn’t turn out to be entirely true. They politely shook my hand and went back to dropping names like boulders of ego-mass on each others’ heads. I didn’t have a single name to drop, except Kris Kristofferson, whom I spent an evening chatting with some 25 years ago and still talk about every time the topic of ‘how many celebrities do you know?’ comes up in conversation. But that didn’t seem appropriate here.
Anyway, I assumed dinner would provide the opportunity for conversation at least with the people sitting on either side of me. Did you know that snooty rich people have voices loud enough to carry all the way across a ten person round table, allowing them to totally ignore those sitting next to them. But it wasn’t only me that they ignored. They ignored the speaker, an illustrious politician with a lot of interesting things to say – I think. I couldn’t hear most of them over the snooty rich peoples’ loud voices.
And their lack of manners didn’t end there. I noticed one of the snooty rich ladies flinging her fork around in the air, smattering tiny dabs of salad dressing all over her Yves St. Laurent gown, reinforcing my belief in a fair and just God.
All of this is leading to a point, which is…money doesn’t give you class, but manners do. I worked with the Empress of Etiquette, Marjabelle Stewart, for many years. I produced videos on manners for children with her, wrote a children’s book on manners with her, and accompanied her to dozens of speaking engagements. There has never been a woman more committed to graciousness than Marjabelle. And when reporters would ask her the number one rule of manners she would always answer, “Being kind."
“Manners are the happy way of doing things,” she would repeat over and over again. And watching her glide through a crowd, greeting everyone from the Secretary of State to the bus boys has made everyone happy to be in her presence.
I never heard Marjabelle say a bad word about anyone. I never saw her ignore anyone. And, of course, I never saw her fling her fork around. No matter how beautifully you may be dressed or how many names you can drop in a single sentence, a lack of manners just screams, “I MAY BE RICH, BUT I’M AS COMMON AS DIRT!”
It doesn’t take a great deal to learn manners. It’s mostly about making people around you feel comfortable, including everyone, and simply being thoughtful of others. No one will notice if you pick up the wrong fork for the fish dish, but they will notice if you talk over the speaker, or turn up your nose at someone who didn’t know the event was formal and wore their Hawaiian shirt to dinner.
Of course, it doesn’t hurt to know which fork to use, either. Get a book. Marjabelle wrote 17 of them. Emily Post and Amy Vanderbilt are still great resources. It will help you in business, improve your social life, and make people like you. What’s happier than that?
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