Almost Royalty: A Romantic Comedy...of Sorts (24 page)

“But I want this beef,” said alien-scanner thing ex-TV star. He reaches down onto my plate and picks up my meat with his hands. He starts eating it.

“It’s good,” said the ex-TV star.

“Put her meat down,” said Josh.

“OK,” said alien-scanner ex-TV star as he spits out all of the meat, spraying both me and Josh.

“You shit,” said Josh lurching out his chair, which makes it easier for alien-scanner ex-TV star to clock him in the face.

It goes without saying that dinner is “on the house.” The battalion of waiters/‌starving actors who staff every restaurant in L.A. muscle alien scanner ex-TV star to an unseen part of the restaurant.

“I’m so, so, so, sorry,” says the owner/‌chef. “Sometimes, I really hate these people,”

“Preaching to the choir.”

“Are you OK?” I ask.

Josh has a little bump on his left temple. At least we get out of the parking lot in record time, what with the owner/‌chef personally overseeing the valet staff to ensure that we leave the restaurant premises safely.

“Really, I’ll drive,” I said.

“I see why these people irritate you,” said Josh.

“That’s not true.”

“What? They don’t irritate you.”

“No. That they’re people.”

January 2008

The Right Match

Headmistress Barbara Ellen (“Brell”) Donovan stared at the color of the walls in her office. Something about it was just… well… a little off. Was it the shade of green she had chosen? She had always liked that forest green color and thought that it gave the room a formal, make that an imposing, look. But did that forest green really go well with that cream border print with the lavender pattern? Hmmmm. Perhaps the forest green didn’t lift the mahogany furniture with the cream silk padding the way she wanted it to. Whatever it was about her forest green walls that didn’t work, Brell was bothered. And when something in her domain bothered her it consumed her to an obsessive point to make it right again, which is why it was so important to Brell to only allow those individuals and their spawn who were right—who were a “a good match”—into Thorton, the one and only private academic (absolutely not-developmental) elementary school in Santa Monica, California.

As it was, the parents in front of her smelled of fear—no make that terror—and desperation. Sure they were blabbing their heads off, doing their best to entertain her, to connect with her on any level. Yes, they were high achievers—she an attorney, just like every working woman on the Westside (Where do they all come from?) and he some sort of producer of something with an impressive Ivy League education.

No doubt they had a fabulous application with lovely recommendations from highly impressive sources. And of course, their child was nothing short of a genius, a five-year-old who read at the fifth grade level, spoke three languages fluently, and played the violin like a young Jascha Heifetz. But maybe that was the problem: They were too good.

As it was, Brell didn’t like to admit too many people who were accomplished. This would have destroyed the balance of her domain and perhaps not allowed her to meet her goals, well, the goals established by those ridiculously well-intentioned Thorton trustees, of a multi-cultural and diverse community. But more to the point, although these parents were accomplished, well-mannered, extraordinary, etc., she knew instantly that they were not going to significantly enable her to meet her number one goal: that of a new building and soccer field for the school, no easy feat in fantastically expensive Santa Monica, an area so valuable that it was more expensive than the fantastically expensive Beverly Hills area known as “the platinum triangle.”

Sure these parents smelled of money—new money—and if they really pushed it and gave up some of their lifestyle, maybe the winter vacation in Vail, they probably could have given her a good $15,000–$20,000 per year “contribution” on top of the full $30,000 per year “comprehensive” tuition. But she needed more than that. Much more, and she wasn’t going to waste a precious spot in that Kindergarten Class—one of the two to four spots open to non-diverse boy applicants—with good, but not great applicant parents. Brell had over 500 applications attempting to fill that spot and she was absolutely sure—because she had peeked—that the little darling of some software inventor, studio president, or high-tech venture capitalist, someone who could afford to give her the $500,000 she was seeking with ease, was in that pile.

Suddenly, Brell knew what was wrong with her room. It was the applicants. They just didn’t look right in it. They just didn’t fit. They were the worst thing that you could say about any applicant’s parents at any private school anywhere: They were
not
a good match.

So Brell, expert verbal marksman that she was, decided to focus, aim, and kill the applicants’ desire to be part of the Thorton community.

She scanned the application in front of her.

Ahh. Of course. This would be easy.

“Tell me, Wendy?” Brell said, looking the nervous mother-parent of the prospective applicant in the face. “Where did you go to law school?”

Brell knew at that moment exactly what that mother wanted to say. She wanted to say, “I went to Harvard and clerked with the Fifth Circuit.” She wanted to say, “I went to Yale and then did a Masters in public policy.” She wanted to say, “I went to Stanford after working at McKinsey for two years.”

But as Brell had that mother’s application in front of her, she couldn’t say that: she had to tell the truth.

The nervous mother swallowed and looked down. “I went to UC Davis,” she said.

Brell pulled the trigger and let her bullet fly.

“Oh,” Brell said with a big toothy smile, “I just
love
those public schools.”

One shot, straight through the heart.

She was good.

It wasn’t always like this. But certain events had conspired to make acceptance to an academic and selective private school in Los Angeles much, much more difficult to obtain than membership to the most exclusive country club. And to be honest, acceptance in an exclusive private school was the new country club, where only the very, very select few were admitted. Frequently while she was out and about, getting her nails done, having a dinner, sitting in a waiting room, Brell heard parents boasting that their little angels just loved John Thomas Dye, Crossroads, or The Brentwood School as if admission to these schools by their child was some extraordinary accomplishment with which to trump their colleagues. Brell found this so amusing.

To begin with, the Los Angeles public schools were a mess. No, make that a disaster. Once upon a time, the California Public Schools were some of the best in the country. During that time, Brell practically had to beg applicants to come to Thorton.

At that time, attending a private school was almost considered quaint, something only the rich or troubled did to deal with their difficult offspring, a luxury few considered. Most who applied were accepted to Thorton and those who could pay the tuition had no problem gaining admission. But the problem was that this situation presented various conflicts as to who was in the power position in the school and Brell rarely won these power struggles with parents, especially when Brell’s duties included driving the school bus—a little awkward when she was dressed in her classic Talbot’s dress suit with matching Nordstrom’s pumps—as well as being the headmistress of the school. This was something that Brell would most definitely like to forget. And anyone who ever spoke about
those days
would be frozen in place by one of Brell’s infamous sideways glances, a look indicating that all hopes for that prospective Thorton application had been permanently and irrevocably dashed.

As it was, Brell took a little sadistic delight seeing the hoops, the exhaustion, the pure unadulterated humiliation—an exercise benignly known and outlined in the application as
The Steps to Thorton
—which she put those parents of prospective applicants through.

Step 1: The Application.
Could they come by and simply pick one up? Absolutely not. You could not even physically get an application
unless
both parents—not just the mom or the dad—but both parents together (or both partners, or the sole legal guardian if that was the situation) submitted to a complete 90-minute tour of Thorton, a tour which was intentionally led by a well-intentioned but completely mono-toned and inarticulate eleven-year-old Thorton student. It always made life so spicy, so interesting for Brell to glance outside her window and see the parents, whom she knew to be divorced, attempting to create a façade of civility as they pretended to listen to a sixth-grade Thorton student lead a tour of something so very, very interesting, like that computer lab filled with 20 Apple computers which every private school in the city had.

But if they made it through the mind-numbing tour and got an application, then there was:

Step 2: Submitting the Application
and $200 “Processing Fee.”
Could they just drive by and submit the application? Absolutely not. Thorton (and Brell) had created the most creative process for submitting applications for the incoming Kindergarten Class: (1) The applications could only be submitted during the second week of September, and not one day before; (2) The application must arrive by standard US mail (absolutely no overnight mail, messengers, faxes, pdf, or personal delivery was allowed); (3) The application
must
arrive before Thorton received 500 girl applications and 500 boy applications (which usually was more like September 10); (4) The application
must
arrive no later than September 14; and (5) The applicant (boy or girl)
must
have turned five years old by July 1 (a certified copy of the birth certificate had to be attached to the application).

Once the application was accepted there were the necessary events which both parents of the prospective applicant had to attend together:

Step 3: The Open House.
Attendance mandatory. Watery coffee and broken Pepperidge Farm cookies to be served.

To Brell, Step 3 was truly the beginning of her “Kill the Enthusiasm” campaign. In Brell’s design, the Open House was the day when she made her “very honest” speech, a speech which was intended to imply to prospective parents that, unless they were prepared to donate $500,000 or more, there was absolutely no chance that their little darlings would gain admission to Thorton.

The principal components of
the speech
were the infamous Three Statements, something Brell always referred to as the
ABC’s of Thorton
to those grossly ambitious and highly educated parents:

A. The Numbers.

Brell’s favorite way to begin her Open House Presentation was to present this bit of information and then see who actually sat through the next two and a half hours to sign their attendance slip (required to proceed to the next step).

“This year, we have 500 boy applicants competing for 40 spots (20 per Class) in the two Kindergarten Classes.”

Brell would look around after this opening and usually hear nervous laughter.

“But to be fair, I need to clarify this issue. First of all we give preference to siblings, alumni children, the children of staff and faculty…”

(And of course what she didn’t say but was clearly the subtext of her
“Goals of Thorton”
section of her speech was, preference was given to
anyone
who had ever contributed more than $500,000 for the greatly desired new building and new soccer field, which, of course, included the trustees’ children, grandchildren and friends of the trustees’ children and grandchildren.)

Brell loved to finish this beginning section of her Open House presentation by adding, “Unfortunately, we’ve just received 33 alumni/‌sibling applications for 40 spaces, and…” (to top it off by disclosing, shhh… like she was letting them in on a little secret which she really shouldn’t tell anyone) “Three of those alumni/‌sibling boy applications were actually for three sets of twins.”

To Brell, there was nothing like watching the faces of those mathematically inclined parents as the smart ones quickly computed that there were now 463 applications competing for four open spots. Brell loved to look around the room and guess by the horrified expression on their faces which parent was the first to realize that they had just spent $200 for a very, very nice two-line rejection letter. Because as smart parents, they had also clearly understood the subtext of her Open House presentation: Those four (or possibly fewer) remaining spots were clearly going to the highest bidder, and unless they were willing to donate their entire retirement account they could just forget about getting in.

B. Diversity

Most Westside parents pretended to love diversity but in reality, unless Grandpa Joe had given $50 million to Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford or maybe even Pomona (in 1960, when that really meant something) and Dad had not embarrassed the family too badly when he attended, they pretty much knew that the odds were stacked against them once the well-intentioned “diversity” got into the picture. When you only had four openings in your Kindergarten class to begin with, and your well-meaning trustees (who, of course, had secured places at Thorton for their family for generations to come) began carping about “diversity,” it was pretty much assured that you would be giving 20 percent of the openings in your class to someone who didn’t necessarily know about Thorton, and someone who didn’t necessarily care to attend.

Brell had heard the rumors about another Westside school which had such a commitment to diversity that it openly discouraged those in the wrong ethnic groups—white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant, Jewish—not to apply. So she thought that she would go with the current trend and give
her
diversity speech.

“Of course,” Brell began, “Thorton has a deep commitment to diversity. We have 120 nationalities represented in the student body. We feel that this gives our students a more complete experience of the world.”