I'm giving readers a well-deserved breather — a cigarette break, shall we say? — and not writing my normally long-winded column this week, but keeping it short and confining it to this page, because I am crazy-busy assisting the editors of The Star as they put another holiday issue of East magazine to bed. There are layouts to be designed and captions about wassail to be written. It's a fun issue and it will appear the day before Thanksgiving. Hot debate in the newsroom today: Is it too unconventional to have a turkey on the cover of East magazine, instead of a human cover model? Exactly how quirky is too quirky, from an advertiser's perspective?
It is at moments like this that I am overawed by previous generations of Rattray women who managed to file their weekly Star columns without a break over the span of four and five decades. My mother turned her column in without pausing for breath for 43 years. Contemplating this is like trying to wrap your brain around the great question of how women managed to keep their sanity, raise children, and do laundry with buckets, mangles, and irons heated on the fire, back before Maytag.
My grandmother, who was even more gossipy and long-winded than I am (if that's possible), wrote her "Looking Them Over" column from November 1923 until April 1973. Her first one is something along the lines of a society column, in which she describes an outing to the races at Belmont Park and an autumnal dance party at Wiborg's Beach with bonfires of fallen leaves and dancing to a jazz tune called "My Sweetie Went Away." Miss Alice Huntting wore a gown of red, Mrs. Cortland Mulford, a gown of blue.
It seems East Hampton society was more active in the Novembers of the Jazz Age than it is in 2024. My only society news to report this week is in regard to a trend among the teenagers of the village. The high school boys have gotten very much into cologne. Have you smelled them? I know this because I shepherded a carload of ninth and 10th graders to and from the Bridgehampton Commons on Sunday so they could shop for scents at Ulta Beauty and T.J. Maxx. Being 14 and 15, naturally, they sprayed the high heck out of one another, perfuming the aisles with, as my son later told me, still laughing, "40 sprays!" My Honda will carry the scent of Chanel Bleu for all eternity.