An article on the impact of Madoff on Palm Beach quotes people saying they live in Palm Beach when in fact they live in West Palm Beach which, as anyone who lives there knows, isn't the same at all. But people fudge things to give an impression of affluence.
When I was growing up in North Carolina, my neighbor's grandparents had a place in Palm Beach, but they always said it was in West Palm Beach, presumably to minimize the impression of their true affluence. But of course, being from resolutely middle class North Carolina and having never been to the Palm Beach area, we had no clue. It all sounded pretty swank to us.
It was only when I actually visited many years later and saw the place that I got it. And it was pretty swank.
This was, of course, the early 80s, when the country had been through a similar economic trauma.
Sunday, April 12, 2009
(West) Palm Beach
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1 comment:
Your neighbors remind me of how people used to avoid saying Harvard, Yale, Princeton, etc. and say I went to college in Boston, or Connecticut or New Jersey. I never went in for that.
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