Denny, I have been reading, reading, reading my days away

"By now I was beginning to form some generalizations about the International Set (not that I ever even found out if they were the Real Thing, I mean what standards would I have to judge them by anyway?). First of all, though very few seemed to be married at the time, they were all passionately involved with one another, This had a way of making conversations rather difficult. For instance, when one of them began talking to you it was impossible to predict which of the others was going to get sore. And the reason they got sore was that it was assumed that the one talking to you was also making a pass at you, and the reason that was assumed was that it generally was true. And the reason it was generally true, was that they had nothing else to talk to me about. Past parties-past and future parties, resorts in and out of season, their own lineages, and those of their friends were their only real contributions to a conversation, except for the one that went "I was in America once..." and then petered into a series of place names, so that by making a play for me I suppose they felt they were keeping their end up. Another thing about them was the way they kept inviting you places; they invited me to a different place on an average of every five minutes, but I discovered there were two rules of governing this: first, it had to be a place you'd never been to, like "What, you've never seen the Blue Grotto? I must take you there on the yacht this summer"; and second, it was understood that each invitation canceled the previous one- I'll leave you to guess what the very last one always was."

-the Dud Avocado, 1958

Sally Jay, you explain so much! I have a proclivity to reading literature that idealizes wherever I am living. I ready John Fante and Charles Bukowski when I moved to LA (okay, so they don't exactly romanticize the city, but somehow it did the trick) , switched to Paul Bowles and Gertrude Stein for Morocco (again, maybe they didn't paint the best picture and Mom almost didn't let us go after reading The Sheltering Sky) and now Elaine Dundy is almost convincing me to move to Paris.. in the 1950s. Well, Ms Dundy, thank you for explaining why Julia and I keep invited to go places, never with a follow up call, and why the married and "taken" men of this international set seem to continue to omit mention of very significant others. Oh, le Maroc!

Love you dearly,
I really do,
MM