Lydia never goes anywhere without her Puma. Wait,
where’s her tennis racket??Photo: Getty Images
It’s not really fair to tease the Times for all of its “Rich People Have Problems” stories. After all, readers like to read about themselves — and the paper devotes plenty of sections to everybody else’s troubles. So we try to chuckle our way through articles like this week’s “Getting All of It There and Back,” which leads the Friday “Escapes” section. It’s about what a pain in your preppy ass it is to get all of your stuff from your first home to your second home, and then get it back again without leaving it out there on Shelter Island or Pound Ridge or Maine or wherever you go in the “country.” Many people, writer Joanne Kaufman has discovered, buy two sets of everything — toothpaste, cell-phone chargers, jars of mayonnaise, expensive shoes — so that there’s one at each house, just in case. Of course, sometimes that doesn’t even work, and you get two sets of Manolos in one house and no mayo in the other. Quel disastre!
[Rich] Klein, the divorced father of an 8-year-old, who has a weekend home in Bethel, N.Y., said he used to feel bad when he forgot to pack certain of his daughter’s possessions, notably her Game Boy, for the trip back to Manhattan. “But now I’m trying to teach her that it’s really O.K., that she can live without her Game Boy for a few days.”
“You learn,” he added philosophically, “that nothing is that urgent.”
Nothing? Karen Robert isn’t so sure. “Once we forgot our daughter,” she confessed. “I thought she was in the back seat.” And though the situation was hastily rectified, “she’ll never let me forget that one.”
Oh, rich people problems. Always hilarious, never terrifying.
