The beautiful people

I read the daily newspapers in Madison for a long time before I realized what was missing: the society pages. Where I grew up, in Nashville, the paper regularly had stories, with photographs, about fancy people meeting other fancy people at fancy places.

I don't miss the society pages. Here in good old egalitarian Madison, where almost everyone is either a civil servant or a Bolshevik, we got no truck with society.

So I was mortified the other day when I looked at the web site of the Tennessean, the daily newspaper in my hometown, and saw an article and slideshow about the Swan Ball, the swankest of swank society events in Music City. The Swan Ball takes place in Belle Meade, Nashville's toniest neighborhood, at Cheekwood, an art museum--which used to be, yes, a plantation house. In light of that, it's dispiriting to flip through the pictures of the ball and realize that fifty years into the civil rights era, the only documented African-American guests were the Williamses, who--coincidentally or not--appear on the very last page of the 77-page slideshow. The only other African-American I spotted in the slideshow was working.

Shudder. Quick, someone reeducate those people.

I don't know if they still do, but for years the police in Nashville held a charity event called, parodically, the Swine Ball. Good on them.