I’m At Almack’s Tweeting On My iphone

I’ve known for some time that I’m a sort of snob. Sorry kids. No, I don’t particularly like it either. I like to think of myself as one of the people and common as muck.

And I’ll grant you, I don’t stand on ceremony for pretty much anything; I don’t believe birth or money or credentials grant you any sort of superiority (note I said credentials, not knowledge or experience); I have no clue of how to do what my mom used to call “give yourself to your respect” which I think meant acting like I was very important and people should bow to me; I can enjoy a greasy spoon as well as a gourmet restaurant (if each is good of its kind.) I have friends of all classes and most occupations (okay, I use them for sources. Sue me.) I was the devoted apprentice of my carpenter grandfathers. No handyman comes to the house without my standing around looking at how they do it, and talking with them – and yeah, I can talk to them and make them feel like they have special knowledge (which they do) and I don’t, so they’re worthy of my respect. (Yes, I also get info out of them for books. Sue me.) And most of the time, I wear jeans and t-shirts and don’t even insist on jeans of any particular make.

But I’ve confronted the fact that I’m a snob when it comes to entertainment LONG ago. I think about ten years ago, when we first had money to buy movies, and I got, let’s see, the Jane Austen mini series, the whole series of brother Cadfael mysteries and a lot of documentaries. It’s not that I don’t enjoy other, more popular movies, but what I WANTED was that. Most of the music I buy is classical. Most of the books I buy are non-fiction historical.

It’s not that I LOOK for refined entertainment, it’s that in whatever venue I enter, I immediately become one of those annoying purists. It’s like it’s in the DNA or something.

Take when I joined Austen fandom. Within weeks, I was sure that all these contemporary retellings of P &P were just wrong, and I was mentally crossing off authors who were blatantly a-historical in the historical mode. And all the time feeling guilty, because it meant I was a snob.

I’m the sort of person who, if she became a graffiti artist, would immediately intuit the “classical” form of the genre and be able to speak, nose in air, about how these young taggers just aren’t doing it right.

It’s a curse, I tell you, particularly when, for reasons of being very busy, very tired and very out of it, I’ve been chain-reading regencies. Why?

Well, most regencies are not that bad, truly. I mean, yeah, they have people behave in a more modern manner than they should, but most of the time they do “explain” it. They have a girl who was an only daughter and whose father treated her as a boy, so she reads more “modern” to us. Or they have people who are “enlightened” due to events in their lives. But they stay KIND OF within the parameters of the time. Some more than others. Heyer was, of course, the master at bridging then with now without making then seem alien, but it’s hard for mere humans to replicate the feats of genius.

But every once in a while, you come across a regency where, other than wearing period clothes (and most of the time not much of them) not only the main characters but EVERYONE behaves as though they were TRULY moderns.

When a girl in the regency told her father she’d sleep with whomever she wanted, and she doesn’t intend to ever get married, because she’ll get a job and support herself or when the prince regent makes a young woman post mistress of England, you KNOW – you KNOW – that there is a strong disturbance in the force.

I put those books aside very quickly, but apparently my inner snob disapproves and decides to punish me.

Last night I dreamed I was at Almack’s, the assembly rooms par excellence of regency England. Everyone was in period garb and being very proper. And then a row of debutantes up against the wall, took out their iphones and started tweeting….

I wake up screaming.