Graduating Like a Gossip Girl
If you're like us, your high school graduation was in some sweaty gymnasium or on a grass-barren athletic field. Not so for the youngs of wealthy New York, who graduated in glorious fashion recently. The New York Observer was there.
They file a long report from some of the tonier campuses: Collegiate, Nightingale-Bamford, Spence, Horace Mann. Those are the typical snooty affairs, with preening about success mingling strangely with a pretense that these are just regular kids being sent off to regular places. Actress Kerry Washington, an alumna, spoke at Spence, while the Ethical Culture Fieldston School (up in Riverdale) grads got a special treat: Will Ferrell. Meredith Vieira's kid was graduating so she called in a favor. Some of the students, however, were not so amused with the funnyman's antics:
He suggested that perhaps a member of the graduating class could go on to be the first black president, except that that had already been done.
"He totally missed the punch line!" said Victoria Goldman, author of the perennially popular Manhattan Family Guide to Private Schools, there to support her graduating nephew. "He should have said that someone here will be the first Jewish president! He just fell flat."
Oh, you've been served Ferrell.
Our favorite anecdote from the They're Rich and You're Not Roundup, though, was that of the student speakers at lefty Brooklyn Heights haven St. Ann's:
"It can be an orgy, because, after all, the St. Ann's ethos has always been uninhibited, experimental, gratifying and incestuous," she told the audience, before offering that perhaps the best adjective to describe her education was "delicious!"
Another speaker, Sam Sullivan, a student of poetry, said some very romantic things about "enchanted gardens" and "childish frolic" and the importance of "fantasy!"
"Before anyone in the so-called real world has a chance to fool us, the gardeners, the graduates, into believing that our lives are about power or money or anything else equally mind-numbing," he warned, "let us go out and just be, because only good can come from that. In the real real world, there is nothing, but love."
Mr. Sullivan then pulled out a guitar and led those gathered in a swaying, earnest rendition of ABBA's Dancing Queen.
Later that evening, the students would be headed to a rented after-party in a loft-the secret address was texted to graduates around 11 p.m.-where they would celebrate their commencement with ironic beer like Miller High Life and Busch; sweaty grinding; and privately hired security guards. The after-after-party was at Dumbo Park, where the graduates traditionally watch the sunrise.
Makes you want to cry, doesn't it?
One final thing that we like to think about: Wouldn't it be creepy if the article's author Irina Aleksander—already kind of a creep (but it's her job!) for lurking around a bunch of high school graduations, a single grownass adult—started seeing the same people at different ceremonies? If there was a club or cult of attending prep school graduations? That would have been a real story.
Ah well. Congrats, you little fuckers.