Red Charm School

The hottest thing in reality TV currently is VH-1's show where the Flavor of Love girls go to charm school. Mo'nique seems to have this thing licked, though I must admit, great first episode aside, I'm nervous when I see a guest appearance coming by New York (who is the epitomy of everything uncouth in the Flavor of Love girls), and when I hear that one of the judges is a pageant dude.

I have a friend who runs a great charm school in Woonsocket, Rhode Island. He and his wife work to take a girl like Paris Hilton, and turn her into Emma Goldman. That's right, it's a Red charm school.

They don't have girls walk with books on their heads, but rather understand that the whole point of making women walk with books on their heads stems from a long held belief that women were too dumb to read. Instead of telling the girl which fork to eat with what course, they explain that the leisure class invents these inane rules in a way to make themselves feel somehow better than the lower classes.

I remember another friend complained that his daughter was becoming too spolied and too much of an ignoramus. At 16, she wanted $150,000 birthday party, would only drive a Bently, and didn't know how many states there were in the US. I thought maybe his daughter could use a turn at the Red Charm School, and he went with my recommendation.

The results were mixed. After just three months there, when she returned home, she donated all of her designer clothes to charity (which made me cringe...), started renting out rooms in her father's mansion to migrant workers, and quoted Veblen and Marcuse to her grandparents. The father was ready to kill me, until he saw his daughter tell her boyfriend he was a "One-Dimensional Meathead" and that she could never waste her life with a dolt that was worth nothing beyond his father's money.

I received an '82 Bordeaux for my help.