With the exception of the 1920s and this current age-of-Paris Hilton, American culture has always celebrated those who wore the bootstraps as righteously cool and derided people born into privilege as clueless and uninteresting.
Perhaps we could call that phenomenon the “Fresh Prince” Principle — Will versus Carlton.
If America could refine these crude oil reserves of its upward-mobility obsession — simultaneously a legend and truth — into real fuel, then Hummer tanks could be filled for the cost of a candy bar.
Obviously, that’s fantasy. So instead, the U.S. mainstream culture refines that obsession, like sugarcane to rum, into social parody. As the bulging shelves of the humor section in used bookstores attest, we especially like our $12.95, graphic-heavy books on the subject. This spring, we get “Hold My Gold: A White Girls’ Guide to the Hip-Hop World” by Albertina Rizzo and Amanda McCall and “The Recovering Sorority Girls’ Guide to a Year’s Worth of Perfect Parties” by Kristina “Morgan” Rose and Deandra “Brooksie” Brooks.
“Never judge a book by its cover” holds true in publishing and with people — even people with giggle-giggle nicknames. Judging the quality of these two seemingly frothy, frolic reads by their covers, the Chip Kid-esque “Hold My Gold” looks subversive, maybe even sick-and-just-wrong in its humor. The paint-swatch pastel design of the “Recovering Sorority Girls’ Guide” cover looks like an outdated early-’90s chunk of self-help book filled with advice easily found elsewhere.
Chip Kid designed great covers for a lot of lousy books. Likewise, Rizzo and McCall logged credits as comedy writers for the David Letterman show and maybe they were funny for Dave. But “Hold My Gold”? Cows on a farm in the stepped hills of Sweden could write more original and insightful jokes about inter-pop-cultural, inter-racial misunderstanding.
This book seems to be written by the last of New York’s prep school girls who had curfews in high school and didn’t harbor a fascination for bad boys.
Either that or when the authors were in high school, they must have snuck out at night to wild-out in the streets of Greenwich, Conn. Maybe they even designed the horsy graphics for the book while hanging out in Kinko’s, the only place open 24 hours in downtown Greenwich.
Anyone who has logged his/her rite of passage through urban skateboard culture, underground hip-hop or just plain code-yellow juvenile delinquency knows that hip-hop is not the monochromatic demographic equivalent of a suburban vegan punk show.
Like basic intersecting lines of supply and demand introduced in Economics 101, it isn’t long after leaving the family nest that we understand life’s two major overlapping forces — birthright of privilege intersecting with self-initiative.
Self-awareness in striving to be someone new can be funnier than laying on self-deprecation while staying the same. The recovering sorority girls of the “Recovering Sorority Girls’ Guide” are fully aware that they might have been duped at pledge time with promises of amazing female networks and chivalrous fiancés. With Kentucky Derby parties to plan, who cares anyway? For Rose and Brooks, it’s all about the friends you take away from the experience.
So here’s where the poetic verse gets put into subversive. “The Guide” works as a quiet parody on the self-actualization genre targeting women. Activities in the book aren’t meaningless at all. Instead of instruction on how to coordinate parties to accidentally-on-purpose set your friend Tricia the nurse up with Brant from marketing, the soirées become avenues for gathering around common interest, facilitating conversation between strangers and building new identities after college.
Privilege, as a line on the graph of life, is dotted with the signifiers of strong identities. WASP humor, like the kind that drives “Hold my Gold,” is all about flaunting with feigned shame. Too bad the authors didn’t feel bad that they lost out on understanding deeper histories and themes. Thus, the book is filled with jokes akin to your grandpa’s humor — socially unloaded one-liners with a wah-wah at the end.
“The Recovering Sorority Girls’ Guide” challenges readers to go for the gusto of the unknown, pull away from what you know and celebrate independence, even if it means being sort of sad, just single and middle-class.
More than anything, it’s the rope-climbing equivalent of the how-to-entertain book. Most tomes on the same topic serve up advice that’s as complicated as the instructions to Dungeons and Dragons. This book is simple and bursting with great new ideas.
Most beautiful of all is the book almost works like a story. Readers can picture the development of the two authors’ post-college relationships while understanding the steps to a better theme party.
Finding humor in sobering up from the scripted promises of sorority life and to make it work as a practical guide brings on the wonderful, and far more difficult, humor of self-reflection.
And estrogen aside, “The Guide” is also a great book for guys trying to recover from studio-apartment bachelor life.
Hold My Gold: Expelled, worse than F
Recovering Sorority Girls: A
