My recent obsession with "Downton Abbey" has convinced me of one very unfortunate fact: I would never make the cut at one of Lady Grantham's dinner parties. I do not really understand why one would need more than one fork for a meal-nevermind the order in which they should be used-and I have a singular ability to get whatever I am eating all over the table. The only table manners I have learned were from my crazy Romanian babysitter who would not let me eat my chicken fingers until I held my knife properly.
"If you want to eat with rich people, you need to do it properly," she would insist. "You must act like a lady!" As you may imagine, at 12 years old, I was much more concerned with eating my damn chicken fingers than with being a lady.
A decade later, I still prefer chicken fingers to manners, but apparently employers would rather I did not, as the dining interview has become increasingly common. So when I heard that L&S Career Advising was offering an etiquette dinner, I cursed the heavens and begrudgingly agreed jumped at the opportunity.
The whole affair was pretty much exactly as I expected it to be. It was slightly fancy, every ambitious ASM whippersnapper was in attendance and it was nothing less than excruciating. It was two hours of trying to figure out various foods without looking like a slob, otherwise known as a normal human being. The woman who led the dinner was a pant-suited, disconcertingly coiffed, vaguely Southern lady who taught me that everything I have done at the dinner table throughout my entire life is "not correct."
Take bread, for example. It is kind of difficult to screw up bread, right? Not correct, as the etiquette guru would say. In fact, there are no less than several dozen ways bread can lead to your downfall. First of all, you have to make sure the bread is proper enough to eat, and I do not mean it has to be bad, it just has to be indelicate. If the bread is too crunchy, well no bread for you, loser.
The next big thing to remember is the bread should never leave your plate. Once that roll is off the plate, you have gotten crumbs everywhere and lost the job you have worked years to earn. Then there is the butter, which may never stay in its foil package because that is "just so unbecoming." You also must rip off and butter individual pieces while maintaining perfect posture, i.e. you must meticulously butter a roll that is on a plate two feet away from your seat. Now, when one (read: me) has comically short dinosaur arms and is wearing a relatively stiff blazer, this is a nearly impossible feat.
If this all seems arbitrary, that is because it is! I will spare you the details of the perils of soup or the potential for a chicken catastrophe, because I only get a few more paragraphs and I am pretty confident that you, dear readers, do not care. What I will tell you is how this whole practice of being "correct" seems to be more of a distraction than anything else. True, you do not want to eat with your fingers or slop soup all over the table, but who aside from a foreign dignitary or Lady Grantham is actually going to care whether you cut your meat American or international style?
Then there is Mrs. Etiquette's general idea of correctness, something indisputable sent down from the Gods of Manners to polish the sloppy miscreants of the earth. She tried to make it seem like an art, rather than what it truly is: bourgie pretension.
Or maybe I am wrong. Maybe etiquette is like grammar; it is what it is and you look silly if you stray from it. Maybe eating a meal is like writing, an art unto itself. Regardless, I am still inclined to eat my bread, crunchy or not.
