Unburdened by Manners
Dear Ann Landers:
Please warn your readers that an RSVP from a Southern California resident means nothing. I cooked for a week for a big holiday party, and seven of my 12 dinner guests--all of whom had RSVP’d “yes”--left me stranded up that well-known creek. One guest “didn’t feel like driving,” another “had to go to the movies” with her mother, a third said she had to do laundry.
Had It in L.A., April 8, 1999
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Dear Ann Landers:
My husband and I were recently married. Our wedding was beautiful, but there was one problem. We had 17 no-shows and four surprise guests. That means we paid for 13 extra meals that nobody ate.
San Diego, Oct. 6, 1998
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Dear Ann Landers:
Personally, I find Southern Californians delightfully flexible. They have the rare ability to understand the cosmic importance of contemplating one’s navel instead of responding to a dinner invitation.
Kirk in L.A., July 14, 1999
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AS THESE LETTERS TO ANN LANDERS SHOW, WHEN IT COMES to honoring social commitments, we Southern Californians have a reputation for casualness. Well, not exactly casualness. Unreliability. Oh, all right. Flakiness. As in, “Sorry I flaked on you.” I don’t know where the word “flake” came into usage as a verb, but it couldn’t have more currency than here in the lower half of the Golden State, where an RSVP has all the value of a turn signal on the 405 Freeway.
Take my friend Tania Oesterreicher, who moved here recently from her native Vienna. She and her husband gave a brunch. There were a lot of no-shows. No explanations. No excuses, not even lame ones. “I just don’t understand people here,” she fretted. “They say they’re going to come and then you never hear from them again.” She was starting to think people didn’t like her.
It seems that Tania, like so many uninitiated newcomers, is burdened by a code of social conduct. Austrians apparently honor invitations, and they do so by showing up on time. Maybe this comes from their proximity to the Balkans, where any hint of bad manners can trip off a 30-year blood feud.
Tania asked me to help her understand Southern California “manners.” I’d rather have tried to explain the “Matrix” plot, but seeing the innocence seeping from her eyes, I agreed.
“Show me the list of MIAs,” I said.
Eric. “Eric said yes,” Tania said.
“Yes doesn’t mean yes, “ I told her. “It means maybe.”
“This cannot be,” she said.
“Did anybody say maybe?” I asked.
“Johnna, Charlie and Michael.”
“Always scratch the maybes off the list. Here, maybe means no.”
Tania’s eyes grew wide, as though she’d just seen Judith Martin drop-kick a halibut. “Then what does no mean?” she asked.
I told her no means, in so many words, “May your family contract hepatitis C and die in a warehouse fire.” Then I asked, gently, if anyone had in fact responded with a no.
She shook her head. That was a relief. At least she was in no imminent physical danger.
Like many Southern Californians who have moved here from someplace else, I had long ago developed the social scar tissue you acquire after your first flake-induced wounds. But now, jolted by Tania’s pained look, I was reliving those first pangs of disbelief at hearing the words, “Hey, I flaked on you.”
Welcome to California, Tania. You think presidential balloting was a mess? Try getting an accurate head count for Saturday.
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MY FRIEND MIKE SZYMANSKI REMEMBERS A CALL HE GOT ONE night. A pair of acquaintances were on their way to a birthday dinner party but apparently had experienced one of those spontaneous losses of enthusiasm. Out of deep consideration for their hosts, they inquired if Mike and a friend would take their places. The party begins in 30 minutes, they said, and here’s the phone number and security code for the gated driveway.
I shook my head. “Embarrassing for you,” I said, “and the host must know that you know you weren’t invited in the first place.”
“But the reason I wasn’t invited,” Mike replied, “was that I didn’t even know the person having the party.”
And people say no one in L.A. ever has an original idea.
In recent months, I’ve collected other examples. A pattern has emerged. Flaking, it seems, comes in three strains. First, there is Aggressive-Passive Flaking. It occurs when the invitee enthusiastically accepts an invitation, then doesn’t bother to call back when he discovers that your six-course, $350 dinner for 10 conflicts with his favorite “Seinfeld” rerun. Tania was a sad victim of the Aggressive-Passives.
The second type is Passive-Aggressive Flaking. It is the right to regard an invitation as the equivalent of a $50 Trader Joe’s gift certificate, redeemable at any time and completely transferable. Mike experienced this particular wonder, as did my friend Ricky, who cowardly refused to let me use his last name but whose ordeal demonstrates that flaking isn’t the exclusive domain of guests.
“I had an acquaintance who kept talking about inviting me over for dinner,” Ricky recalled. “This was someone I didn’t particularly want to have plans with, but she kept insisting.” Finally a date was set, and on a torrentially rainy night, Ricky hydroplaned from the mid-Wilshire area to Venice, which at this point was only a couple of gondolas shy of its Italian namesake. At the entrance, he punched in the security code. No answer. He waited a few minutes and tried again. Still no answer. He surfed back across town, torn between outrage and concern.
Next morning, his would-be hostess phoned to explain that she “hadn’t been feeling well” and that, not to put too fine a point on it, she’d “fallen asleep.” Then, with the absence of contrition singular to those who read Ayn Rand too young, she conceded, “I owe you a dinner.”
Then there is Pernicious Flaking. In this noteworthy permutation, the guests do indeed show, but you wish they hadn’t. Consider my friends Corey and Claudia Saldana. Both are gracious hosts, and Corey is a superb chef. If not for good old-fashioned Puritan shame, I would find a way to invite myself to dinner at Corey’s three nights a week.
The Pernicious Flakes--let’s call them the Johnsons--were uninhibited by any similar affliction. The guests had proposed a dinner. “Let’s meet in the San Gabriel Valley,” Corey suggested, thinking geographically, since the Johnsons lived way out in Diamond Bar. But the Johnsons, being new parents, insisted on a more homey affair, their definition of “homey” meaning at Corey’s place, with Corey doing all the work. The Johnsons then insisted that dinner be set for 5:30 on a Saturday; their 8-month-old son’s inviolable bedtime was 8:30 and, after all, they lived quite some distance away.
Corey started making his wonderful beef stroganoff in late afternoon. By the time the Johnsons arrived at 7:30, two hours late, it was scarcely recognizable. But that wasn’t the Johnsons’ main concern. Instead, they wanted to know if the Saldana home had been child-proofed.
Well, no, it hadn’t, since pugs generally don’t stick their paws into electrical sockets. After some negotiating, it was time to serve the stroganoff, which by now was doing a Dorian Gray imitation. Dinner was soon interrupted by Mrs. Johnson, who suddenly sprinted to the SUV to fetch the video of their son’s birth, which ran well over half an hour, involved a Caesarean and somehow did nothing to enhance the appetizing qualities of the aging stroganoff. It was midnight before the charming trio left.
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SO JUST WHAT IS THERE ABOUT THIS PLACE THAT FOMENTS FLAKINESS? Again, I asked around. “That’s just bigoted East Coast elitism,” one individual replied. “It’s just the same in New York as it is here.”
Really? I felt compelled to undertake a thorough examination of conscience. Not my own, mind you, but the collective conscience of Southern California. This may sound presumptuous, but then again, I am a narcissist--or so I discovered several years ago when I sat in the now-defunct Onyx Cafe, grumbling about a party I didn’t want to go to.
“Why don’t you just flake?” I was asked by a guy everyone called Brainwave Dave, who wore a black beret and smoked a clove cigarette.
Flake? He put a little topspin on the word that made it sound like a form of ritual sacrifice. I said I didn’t want to hurt anybody’s feelings.
“Pure narcissism,” he snarled. Only a true narcissist, he explained, would invest himself with the power to hurt people’s feelings. (The Onyx was always full of people who were very, very confused about Nietzsche.)
Anyway, I embarked on an unscientific poll. I put the question to a couple dozen people: Are Southern Californians socially unreliable? About 40% gave me a blank look and said they didn’t know. The other 60% began ranting and raving about empty chairs at dinner parties and bowls of leftover tiramisu. They estimated that 20% to 40% of people who accept invitations simply don’t show.
This got me to thinking: Could the 40% who professed not to know about flakes actually be the flakes who offended the other 60%?
Interesting, I thought, but scientifically inconclusive. I needed more, something like a unified theory of Southern California flakiness. So I asked a psychologist who has what some might regard as certain New Age tendencies. He replied that California is an earthquake center, which means it’s also a center of catalytic energy, which means that people start things but don’t finish them. This also had something to do with ley lines, he said, but I was quickly losing the thread.
Eventually I found my way to Jill Stein, a social psychologist who is the executive director of the LeRoy Neiman Center for the Study of American Society and Culture at UCLA. Jill, it turns out, is also a native Angeleno who describes herself as a reformed flake. While she hasn’t formed a unified theory of localized bad behavior, she has some well-considered opinions.
For starters, she rejects the idea that too much sunshine on the noggin renders us addled and listless. “It’s not like we are a siesta kind of climate,” she said. “We’re not hot and humid.”
As for the region’s sprawl, Jill believes that distance and traffic are more convenient excuses than actual reasons for flakiness. On the other hand, the absence of distinctive changes of season may come into play. “Here, any day can be warm and sunny and you could take a walk on the beach,” she said. “And when you come down to it, a walk on the beach can be preferable to certain social obligations.
“The way we’re driven here is not the way people are driven on the East Coast,” she continued. “‘We pamper ourselves a great deal. We’re directed inward and it’s approved of, it’s rewarded, it’s praised. It’s part of the mythology of California.”
Then she dropped a bomb. “Part of it is that we’re an industry town.”
I was shocked. Did she mean Hollywood? I gasped at the notion that those jolly folks in backward baseball caps who careen through the streets in six-story SUVs while talking to their agent, manager and accountant on three cell phones at once might also be ace practitioners of social opportunism. I had always assumed they were too busy imperiling the lives of dogs and pedestrians to budget time for hurting feelings.
Well, yes, she did mean Hollywood. “It’s a culture of whom you know,” she said. “It’s seeing and being seen, trying to find the best invitation.” Jill admitted to having spent a fair amount of time in the midst of this culture.
“The way that I used to organize my social life was to wait and see what kind of invitations came in and choose among them. I used to say yes without meaning yes, and would just go to what I felt like showing up for. That seemed to me to be completely my birthright. If somebody gave me a hard time about it, I’d have thought they were being uptight. It’s like, ‘If you have to ask, your party must have been a real loser.’
“On occasion, I would be called a flake and I thought it was a compliment. I took some pride in being unpredictable--you never knew where I was going to show up. It was a part of my being the life of the party in my own particular way, thinking that I somehow made myself a more interesting guest.”
It was hard to connect this kind of behavior with the nice person I was talking to on the phone, a person you’d be delighted to have at your party, but in light of the above would be terrified to invite. I was relieved when Jill said, “I don’t conduct myself that way anymore.” She listed a number of reasons for her own conversion, but added that we shouldn’t count on the rest of the population being similarly enlightened (take note, Tania), because in these parts, we have a certain code for responding to invitations. “If you don’t know how to decode it, you’re going to assume it’s meant literally when it’s not. There’s an understanding that if you take it at face value, you’re a buffoon.”
This struck terror in my heart. I resolved to go live in a shack in the bayou, commune with the alligators, make pots of jambalaya and unload double barrels of rock salt at anyone who dared step on my land.
But there was still one part of this equation that didn’t quite compute. How on earth do people divest themselves of such aggressive rudeness? How do you expect ever again to face the host of a six-person dinner party when you’re responsible for some expensive yellowtail sashimi being dumped in the disposal?
Here Jill passed the torch to her associate, Kerry Ferris, who had just thrown a goodbye party for herself. Kerry was leaving to take a job as an assistant professor of sociology at Bradley University in Peoria, Ill., where, she said, “RSVPing is not a problem,” or so she hoped. (All 60 of her affirmative RSVPs showed up for her goodbye affair, by the way, although she had feared otherwise.)
“People who observe etiquette see themselves as part of a group,” she said. “People who don’t observe etiquette see themselves only as individuals. So if you think of parties only as a way of enhancing your own individual fortune, then you don’t address social obligations. You engage in certain calculations: What will be the consequences of blowing somebody off? And when it comes to accepting the excuse, the calculation is the same.”
This got me to thinking about the party my friend Kim Masters had thrown for her 1-year-old last year. I had RSVP’d even though I hadn’t wanted to go--for good reason. I knew it would be composed primarily of new mothers tranced out by sleep deprivation, and that it would take at least two showers to scrub the errant breast milk out of my ears. But I went, partly because I wanted to see Kim and partly because her European parents had bestowed her with an Old World standard of courtesy that does not brook frivolous violation. (Well, in truth, also because Kim has the power to make fire rain down from the sky, which is part of the reason she’s one of the most feared journalists in Hollywood.) Who would be foolish enough to flake on Kim?
As it turned out, the answer was a certain high-powered executive. Kim’s phone chirped as I hugged her hello. It was the executive, asking for her address and saying she was on her way. About an hour went by. No executive. Then a florist pulled into the driveway and delivered a bouquet from said executive, but no explanation for the change in plans.
I waited for the green sparks to start shooting from Kim’s eyes but, to my surprise, she just laughed. “Now there’s a twist,” she said, and began counting up guests. The tally: seven no-shows out of 25 positive RSVPs.
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Dear Kirk in L.A:
You will get no negative comment from me on people who live in California. My column appears in several newspapers in the Golden State, and I am not about to take a crack at them. Also, I have a sister who lives there.
Ann Landers, July 14,1999
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Dear Ann Landers:
I’m writing with advice for Kirk in L.A. I suggest that he run his dinner or cocktail party like an airline: Overbook. If too many people show up, give them a rain check and a to-go cup, and send them on their way.
Martin in L.A., Nov. 26, 2000
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P.S. If I invite your sister to my New Year’s party, do you think she’d come?