Cathy Seipp on Party Manners

There are innumerable reasons why those who personally knew Cathy Seipp, who passed away last year at the age of 49, miss her. For the larger group who knew Cathy through her writing, I know it's her voice that's so keenly missed. I went on her blog last week just to hear it.

One of the most impressive things about Cathy was, you could not assume her opinion, on any issue. Something you'd think she'd hate, she'd love. Something you assumed she'd castigate, she'd herald. This was by turns illuminating and infuriating, and never, ever dull, and I could buy myself a steak dinner if I had a nickel for every time she said, "But you have to admit, Nancy, I'm usually right."

When the LA Times last year began its seemingly endless series of cuts and tantrums, emails passed amongst Cathy's friends, so wishing Cathy were here to blog about it. I've been having the same feeling regarding Sarah Palin; I want to hear Cathy on Palin! While I have an idea of what she might think, I can't assume I'm right, and so asked a few of our mutual friends.

"To me, speculating on what she might have thought or said kind of misses the point of Cathy, which is the utter originality of that mind," wrote Hillary Johnson. "Our ongoing loss lies in the very inability to know--or even venture to guess--what she would have thought."

"I imagine Cathy would absolutely love the froth into which the left has been whipped by Palin," wrote Jackie Danicki. "But I also think she'd relate Palin to her upbringing in Orange County. I so love these two paragraphs [Cathy] wrote once":

"I grew up in conservative, practically all-white Los Alamitos, a hicksville suburb in Orange County…In high-school history class, the teacher mentioned that Jesus spoke Aramaic. This shocked one girl so much she started to cry, insisting tearfully that "Jesus spoke English!" If you explained you didn't celebrate Christmas because you weren't Christian, people often looked at you uncomprehendingly – as they did if you said you wanted to live somewhere else one day, or if you described a book they hadn't heard of, which was practically any book.

So I spent my formative years in a constant state of irritation, which was good practice for my life today. Because here in Medialand, people often look at you uncomprehendingly if you explain that not everyone in America agrees with the received media wisdom about topics like affirmative action, abortion, and gun control – and that, furthermore, these people with different ideas are not necessarily evil bigots, even if some of them do go to church. The insular cluelessness of many of my colleagues actually irritates me more than the insular cluelessness of my uneducated old neighbors. Because journalists, unlike the descendents of Dust Bowl refugees, are supposed to be curious about – or at least aware of – other people with different points of view.

"I think Cathy... would be amused at the sight of the MSM falling all over themselves to trash Palin," wrote Kate Coe. "Who, if she wasn't a Republican, would be the darling of the women's mags the rest of the time.  Vogue did a photo essay with her, and it's all "atta-girl"... Cathy was pretty quick to spot obvious hypocrisy and double standards in the world of the trendy left, although Pain's accent might have made her scream at the TV."

Or, she might have seen its virtues, and convinced us why we should, too.

I started thinking about this again this morning after reading a review the new biography, Emily Post: Daughter of the Gilded Age, Mistress of American Manners. While I cannot presume much about Miss Seipp, I can state with conviction her allegiance to good manners. During a visit to a Hollywood writer's apartment, Cathy spotted, in the writer's bathroom, a rack on which the writer had hung her hand-washed underthings, a lost feminine art Cathy so appreciated she told me about it. She also wrote about it, in a review of Cheryl Mendelson's Home Comforts:

Housekeeping is really not an area where there is room for moral relativism. There is a right way and a wrong way and attempting to find wriggle room usually ends badly. After I first read Home Comforts, I was inspired to polish the silver, something I hadn’t done for months. This left me with a few very dirty cleaning rags.

My inner slattern wondered: Do I really have to wash them separately like Cheryl Mendelson says? There weren’t enough dirty rags to make a full load, and I needed to wash some other things. As a result, my clothes and I smelled like silver-wear polish for a week.

“Oh,” Mendelson chuckled comfortably when I told her about this laundry misadventure, “I could have told you that.”

Reading the New Yorker review of the Post biography, I longed to hear Cathy's review of said same; her take on debutantes of the Gilded Age being expected to know dances such as "Blindman’s Bluff, the Ladies Mocked, the Cards, the Ropes, the Mirror, the Dresden (in which participants pretended to be pieces of china), [and] the Hobby-Horse (for which the men were supplied with horse costumes and the women with little whips)." On the sentiment, “The French say that the ideal condition for a woman would be to be born a widow,"  expressed by the heroine of Post's first novel, written after the dissolution of Post's own unhappy marriage. I wanted to hear Cathy on the "Worldlys, Wellborns and Toploftys," characters created by Post for Etiquette, her seminal book on manners; to hear Cathy on etiquette in general...

Then I realized I already had, in deed and in word, and could again.

Comments

[Janet C]

I only knew Cathy through her writing. I lived in hicksville Irvine during my adolescence, just few years after her stint in Los Alamitos.

Many times in the last year I've missed her take on things. Like you, I'm curious what her take on Palin would be.

It's so sad that she's gone.

[Alice Bachini-Smith]

Thanks for posting this, I hadn't read the article you linked to before. What a lovely treat.

[Eric]

1.) Hey! I was born in Los Alamitos!

2.) It's nice to hear your non-political voice again! (I enjoy your politics, I'm just tired of all this fuss regarding the 3 or 4 percent undecideds! Let's vote!)

3.) Slattern is an entirely underused word.

4.) >> "The French say that the ideal condition for a woman would be to be born a widow." I am going to use that until the day I die.

5.) Cathy and I gnashed teeth a few times via Amy's blog, and truthfully I didn't much like her. It's nice, and interesting to me, that so many adored her.

[Brett]

Great post Nancy! Cathy had that edge without being nasty. She was so talented.

It was fun to hear what some of those who knew her best thought she might say about Palin. Although, like you said, she was difficult to predict.

[Mike LaRoche]

I never knew Cathy, but I miss her dearly.

[Jason S.]

I thought Cathy Seipp was inspiring. Obviously, I didn't know her, but like a lot of people, it seemed like you knew her because of her distinctive voice. Or maybe it was just fun to read what she had to say about stuff because it was unpredictable. She seemed refreshingly old-fashioned, which sounds sort of like an oxymoron. Yet I remember reading how her summertime uniform was wearing men's boxer shorts and not giving a darn about walking her dog out around the neighborhood in these boxer shorts. Ha. It would be interesting keep reading her thoughts about Palin or anything else for that matter.

[Nancy Rommelmann]

"Refreshingly old-fashioned."

Yes! That's wonderful, and very apt.