Thursday, May 15, 2008
And the prize for lamest bunch of partying twits in tuxes goes to ...
Mar 27, 2000 | The swells came to San Francisco's Fairmont Hotel Sunday night in tuxes and gowns to feast and revel in the springtime rite of honor and sacrifice known as Oscar night.
The best thing that happened was a white-haired woman with a German accent came over and said she knew I was a journalist because journalists are always "dressing so badly." I was wearing the suit I got married in. She meant I had no tux. Even though they dress badly, she said, journalists are interesting to talk to. So she sat down. Her name was Charlotte.
"Don't you have a dinner jacket?" asked Charlotte. "You have to go to a secondhand store and get one."
I told her I would.
Then Charlotte, who said her family was kicked out of Silesia (now in Poland) after World War II, told me that these days women wear hardly any jewelry, and this is something of which she does not approve. She herself was wearing 20 miles of pearls on her neck, four loops on her wrist, a gold ring with a grape-size sapphire surrounded by diamonds, three gold bracelets and a gold watch.
The actress on the giant screen was wearing, like, hoop earrings. I looked into the plain, unadorned face of the actress and thought, here we Americans are in the hog wallow of wealth without a competitor in the world and we dress like Pilgrims. I asked Charlotte if she thought it was our puritanism. She said no, it's just that Americans have no style. Not yet.
"Just the same, I don't want to be seeing the bare bosoms," she said.
I thought, well, that's a matter of opinion.
The Grand Ballroom of the Fairmont up there on famed Nob Hill was about the size of a hockey rink and filled with 50 tables with 10 chairs each, set with silver plates, three forks on the left, two knives and a spoon on the right and a spoon up top, wine glass, champagne glass and water glass and a lovely pinkish napkin folded to stand up and display three points, like a handkerchief in the pocket of a multimillionaire.
Waiters brought us little flat raviolis with seafood inside. They brought us salads. They brought us meat. It was lovely. In the center of each table, golden grasses grew out of two black film spools.
So this is where they keep the rich people, I thought. The women: tanned, sleek -- that look. The men: tanned, sleek -- that look. Me: a little eccentric, a little schlumpy -- that look. And there we were, all of us at a table watching three giant television screens.
It was a $150-a-plate benefit for the Film Institute of Northern California's "outreach and educational program." When I first heard it was a film outreach benefit, I thought: You mean there are children going to bed at night without cinema, children coming home after school to houses without fresh videocassettes, even children living in houses without a VCR? We must do something. We need film outreach. The man from the Film Institute said it was a very worthwhile thing.
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