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Society: Confessions of a Social Climber

I go to the right parties. I know the right people. My friends’ names appear in bold every week in Paper City. So why doesn’t the camera love me?
By Ray Allen |

I HATE PAPERCITY. IT’S SUPERFICIAL, slick, and showy. It concerns itself with the mindless pursuit of all that is expensive and in style. And, to top it off, it’s based out of Houston. Houston! What? We don’t even have the stuff it takes to be the chroniclers of our own crassness? It’s an embarrassment.

And I study it like a Talmudic scholar.

PaperCity is one thing and one thing only: pictures. Of us. Of Dallas. In our element. At parties and restaurant openings and charity fundraisers and gallery shows. In the same manner as Playboy, it has articles, I suppose. Who cares? If I want articles, I’ll watch TV. No, I “read” PaperCity for the pictures. It’s the Harvard of party pics. Other publications dabble in party pics. The Dallas Morning News does them. D Magazine even does them in color. But there’s too much other stuff that gets in the way of what really matters. If your smiling face appears in a black-and-white, poorly lit picture in PaperCity, you don’t have to make excuses. You’ve won.

Every month, it’s the same thing. I say to my wife, “The new PaperCity is out.” She says, “So? It’s a stupid magazine.” Then we pick up copies and pore through them over brunch at Bread Winners.

Last month, like always, PaperCity read like a roll call of our friends. “There’s Brady and Megan,” I said. “And Brady and Megan and Brandt. Where’s Tessa? Oh, here she is. The Schlegels again. Wait! We were at that party! There’s Crickett and Randall. And another one of them. And another! Kristy and Jody. Margaret with Glenn. Glenn with Jody. Margaret with Dana and Reagan.

“I can’t believe this. Every single one of our friends has their picture in this stupid magazine except us. It’s the same people over and over. What? Dallas has only 16 people?”

My wife just looked at the articles—about clothes. “Why do you care so much?” she asked.

“Because. Because—look, I don’t care about the pictures per se, but not having our picture in PaperCity separates us from our friends. It’s a stigma. It means we’re losers.”

“Speak for yourself,” she said, eyeing a Barbara Bui shearling coat for $3,300.

“Honey, this is serious. We live in this town, we go to all these parties, and it’s like we’re being intentionally excluded. This paper is a barometer of social consequence. You can track who’s on the rise and who’ll soon have to move to Balch Springs simply by their PaperCity appearances. The once-ubiquitous Eric Kimmel is out. Now, it’s Ken Downing on every page. If it were possible to short a person like a stock, we could make a fortune based on this paper alone!”

“We do not go to all those parties,” she said. “You’re always too tired. We go to a few. Why do you think we would stand out? Are we models? Do we own five restaurants? Are we the heads of PR at Neiman Marcus? Do we chair the Crystal Charity Ball? Do we wear fashionable clothes?”

“My suits are custom made!” I said. “Remember that picture of Troy Aikman on the cover of GQ? Same tailor!”

“That issue came out in the ’80s—same decade your suits were all made.”

“Those suits are timeless,” I said. “And I ruled in the ’80s!”

“Look,” my wife said. “I hate to shatter your dreams about getting into PaperCity, but there’s no mystery to it. Either you’re a Schlegel or you’re not. If you lack Schlegelness, you get in by kissing up to the photographers. There are exactly three who matter: Nan Coulter, Kristina Bowman, and Andy Hanson. Nan is the trim, smart-looking woman with the black, severely fashionable glasses.”

“I’ve met Nan,” I said. “I’ve chatted amiably with her on a number of occasions, hoping that she would do that wonderful thing where, mid-sentence, she suddenly steps back, makes the ’squeeze together’ motion with her arms—indicating that you and the person you’re standing with are supposed to huddle close and look your normal dazzling selves—flashes off two or three shots, and then pulls out her little notepad and makes sure she has the right spelling of your name. Or, if you’re already a boldface name, the notepad stays in her back pocket. I’ve witnessed this ritual a lot. From the side.”

“Well, forget about Nan,” my wife said. “She only shoots for the Morning News and D. And, by the way, those places pay their photographers. PaperCity doesn’t. They get their pictures for free, meaning they’ll print basically anything.”

I began to feel a bit unsteady. “Anything?” I said. “Then how do those PaperCity photographers make a living?”

“Kristina and Andy are hired by the people throwing the parties. Here,” she said, turning to a page of party pics from a Cotillion Club ball. “These pictures were paid for by the Cotillion Club, not PaperCity.”

I turned to the same page. Could it be that PaperCity amounted to little more than paid advertising? Less Harvard than DeVry? I assumed that the noise in my head was the sound of my worldview crumbling.

Then I turned to the next page, and everything was okay again. Better than okay, in fact, because there, in all its black-and-white glory, from a Tony Bennett charity concert, was a picture of me. I slowly turned my copy of PaperCity around and laid it neatly on the table like it was a royal flush to my wife’s full house. She gave it a glance and called for our check.

When we got home, I expected a message from the Schlegels on our answering machine, congratulating me on my richly deserved social promotion. Maybe an invitation to cocktails from Angie Barrett. Instead, there was just a message from my friend Lawrence.

“When did you get a flesh-colored turtleneck?” he asked. “It’s either that, or you swallowed your chin.” He had obviously worked on this assessment for some time. “You look like the ugly twin brother of an older version of yourself.”

But I didn’t care. Because Lawrence knew and I knew that things were different between us. If he expected me to talk to him at the next party I saw him at, he would have to be serving drinks. Because I was in PaperCity, and he wasn’t. Me, Ray Allen. A man on his way up.

Ray Allen is a Dallas-based attorney who once crashed a private fundraising party for Steve Forbes at the house of Wick Allison, the publisher and editor of this magazine. Ray wore an Armani tuxedo.

HOW TO BE FABULOUS

Don’t know East Egg from West? Haven’t the foggiest who the Four Hundred are? Here’s your step-by-step guide to climbing the social ladder and getting your mug in the party pics.

STEP 1. Be young and beautiful.

STEP 2. Buy a new wardrobe. Correction: buy the right wardrobe. Don’t know what to buy? Rule of thumb: go to Highland Park Village. Buy Prada if possible. Or Michael Kors. Escada for women. Don’t recognize these names? You wouldn’t, because you would never consider spending the kind of money that these clothes cost. But you want to be in the party pics, remember? So pay half the minimum payment on your credit card for a couple of months.
Pretend a car lease payment got lost in the mail. Good clothes stay fresh only for a season. Your debt is like a loyal dog. Don’t feed it, leave it in the car all day, kick it
even—it will stay with you.

STEP 3. Get the right haircut. If you’re a guy, look at the picture of Dave Barry in the Sunday Dallas Morning News. Your hair should not look like that. Take the latest People to your stylist and tell her that you want your hair to look like Justin Timberlake’s. Girls, go for the Britney Spears look. Or any one of the 14 Gwyneth Paltrow looks. Shoot, drag Nan Coulter in with you. Ask for her cut. Her hair looks great.

STEP 4. Go to all the charity parties, galas, gallery openings, trunk shows, and bar openings that you possibly can. You should be going out at least six nights a week and attending at least two ladies’ luncheons per month. If you’re a girl, make it four. It’s a lot of work, true, and you might find yourself drinking more than normal. Drinking a whole lot, even. But that will help take your mind off your credit-card debt. You say you have a job? So what? There are people in this town who don’t have to work and they don’t. They are your competition.

STEP 5. Here’s what brings it all together. When you get to the party, head straight over to the photographer. How will you know where he or she is? Look for the place in the party where there’s the highest concentration of people. In rugby, they refer to it as a “scrum.” The photographer is in the middle. Make note of the people encircling the photographer. Look at their clothes. Look at their hair. They look like you! Now talk to the people scrum. Turn on the charm. Flatter. Complain about the finicky electrical system in your Jag. Mention that you spent the whole weekend going through your old clothes and boxing up a bunch of Donna Karan dresses and Manolo Blahnik shoes for Goodwill.

Trust me, this will do it. Just remember to keep your chin up, turn your shoulders, and put one foot forward. And don’t blink when the flash goes off. —R.A.

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