May your Sperrys give you blisters, may your son be uninterested in inheriting your Patek Phillipe.
May your housekeeper be an American citizen; may she have an up-to-date OSHA regulations handbook in her purse at all times.
May you forget to update your summer residence information in time to make it into the Social Register’s Dilatory Domiciles this year.
May you develop carpal tunnel your first year of Princeton crew; may you be invited only to the dinner clubs founded after 1950.
May your summer internship be affected by your Gentleman’s C.
May your first divorce remove you from the rolls of the St. Cecilia’s Society; may your ex-wife be named next year’s Social Chair.
May the board vote no.
May your middle name be misspelled when your country retreat is featured in Architectural Digest.
May your second wedding be absent from the Marriages section of the Sunday Times; may your first wife’s remarriage receive two fat columns and a 400×500.
May your invitation to the Bohemian Club be lost in the mail; may you be forced to visit your wife’s relatives in Pasadena this year.
May the bridge named after your great-grandfather collapse, killing fourteen.
May all of your private jets disappear in the fog over Martha’s Vineyard.
May your daughter remain waitlisted even after your generous donation to Harvard.
May your mistress and your wife buy the same model of yacht, so that you can never be sure if you’re keeping the bills separate.
May your stroke never improve, may your Tom Collins always be watered down at the nineteenth hole, may the links be always affected by ongoing club construction.
May your son’s fraternity be visited by scandal and defeats in both polo and lacrosse.
May all your employees demand comprehensive health insurance; may the hospital wing named after your father fail to develop any interesting cures this year.
May your ex-husband marry Wendi Deng and change the terms of your children’s trusts in her favor.
May something terrible happen to The Markets.
May your Fraxel session leave you reddened for an extra three days; may all of your tennis bracelets have to get resized.
May all of your sons become DJs, may all of your daughters design handbags.
Tags: curses, magic, rich people things
Reminds me when I bought a fake Patek Phillipe on my last vacation and it felt like a good “fuck you” to the man, like, may your brand be tarnished by this piece of shit that fell apart after 5 days.
If I were a rich man,
Yubby dibby dibby dibby dibby dibby dibby dum
All day long I’d develop carpal tunnel on the Princeton crew
If I were a wealthy man
I’d like to develop carpal tunnel on the Princeton crew, if you know what I mean.
Do you mean you want to give a bunch of crew dudes handies?
PRECISELY
*puts monocle back on*
Thank you sincerely for the spit take.
may your island come pre-inhabited.
welcome to european history, 1400-1900
May you summer in the spring
These. Are. Perfect.
BUT – my Sperry’s gave me blisters and I am not yet rich, so where is my disappearing private plane is what I’d like to know.
You answered your own question, though. IT DISAPPEARED.
BEWARE OF THE CURSE!
May your Nantucket Reds fade immediately to Bermuda Pinks.
FAVORITE
May your personal shopper buy your pants in a shade that is almost, but not quite, Nantucket red.
I feel like I needed footnotes for this post. But thanks to Google I now know what a Gentleman’s C, Patek Phillipe, and the Social Register are.
(I went to a rich-kid college, so you’d think I’d know this stuff. But the really rich kids don’t really hang out with the kids who were in the FFA and still own jeans from K-Mart, so.)
I also had look up like half of the references in this post. St. Cecilia’s Society? WHO KNEW. Fraxel? HAD NO IDEA.
Right?! Mallory, how do you know all these rich people codes.
She went to Connecticut that one time.
Undergrad at rich kid college gets more and more surreal the further into real life I get.
I googled Dilatory Domiciles but I still can’t figure out why they call it that. Is it for people whose households are just suuuper slow, like you’ve been waiting all day for the dishwasher to finish running so you can use your fine imported china again?
Literally every human being who has ever gotten on a private plane has died within twenty minutes: FACT.
i don’t know what a fraxel session is and i’m scared to google it.
FACE LASER
my fear was appropriate.
May your yachting flag belt spell out the word C H E A P.
I once saw a boat on the canal here whose name was CASHFLOW.
May your regular hairdresser be out on the day of your appointment, causing his replacement to give you ashy blonde highlights instead of golden blonde.
I’m remembering this for use on a rogue aunt.
How you know all my aunts are Jews: their hair is uniformly black or uniformly red, well into their 70s and 80s.
In my family it’s a uniform shade of “Jewish Lady Beige.”
May your car elevator jam two inches below level with the garage floor.
I feel like a lot of these could just be “may you turn into Mitt Romney.” May your presidential campaign be riddled with gaffes. May your horse fail to advance in the Olympics.
HAH, same mindset, see my curse below, a thinly-veiled reference to the 47% video.
Also, “May your horse fail to advance in the Olympics” made me snort water up my nose. Hysterical.
May your dinner guests discover you filling the Cote du Rhone bottles with Franzia.
May someone surreptitiously record you speaking ill of the non-wealthy at your $50,000-per-plate event.
May your grandmother’s mink be forgotten at a bar. By your son.
I’m neither American nor rich enough to get many of these. But that’s ok. I’d like a Tom Collins though, please!
I wonder what the Canadian version of the curses would be. May the Queen never recognize you and offer a knighthood. ???
May a moose bearing a charming, polite mountie never darken the doorstep of your rural Ottawa farmhouse carrying a basket of Tim Hortons and timbits. (Maybe??)
May all your toonies turn to loonies.
May you never have the opportunity to renounce your Canadian citizenship in exchange for a British peerage.
*snort*
May your “quaint” 5,000 square foot cottage in Muskoka have spotty wifi.
I tweeted a Maya Peterson quote and link from the Buzzfeed article, and the hateful messages I’ve been showered with for this modest, brief encouragement of her — this barrage of hate and viciousness that can only be the frailest possible shadow, the most laughably tiny sliver of the bile and fury Maya Peterson must be getting — makes me hope more than ever that she’s weathering this storm with the grace and strength that seems to be her hallmark, and that she has both a trigger-happy block-button finger and a chance to walk away from the internet for a break when she needs to.
I’m DYING to come up with a witty curse, but all I gots is: may your daughter never be satisfied with her horse and always want a better horse but that horse never exists and forever may you seek and continually buy that mythical beast.
May you give your daughters horse away since it was “just never going to amount to anything,” and then be pestered years later by the new owner asking you to pay to ship it to Canada since she got a divorce, and you must decide whether to give this woman thousands of dollars or to put down the horse your daughter still loves.*
(happened to my boss)
OMG…what an awful situation but so freaking typical, sad to say; to some people, horses are just throw away disposable. I see it at the barn where I board my big, loveable lawnmower (he’s currently out of service for a myriad of reasons and I will continue adoring him, always forever and ever, much to the financial chagrin of my non-horsey partner).
Sent from my iPad
My mom’s horse is living in the most ridiculous splendor, because when he was retired due to a career ending stifle injury, she didn’t have the heart to move him from the expensive barn where all his little horse buddies are. So now he spends his time hanging out in the paddock bossing around younger horses and being smug. Did I mention he’s 27? I think he could go on like this another five years.
I love your mom!
Sent from my iPad
I also love your mom.
May your binders remain devoid of women.
May your daughter marry a Democrat, but not a politician.
ouch
May your trees never achieve the “right” height.
May your country club’s staff unionize.
May your kitchens never stock chrome plates for your hollandaise.
Totally thought you said ‘kittens’
LOL, those kittens are just lazy
For shame.
Fine. Fine.
Oh, can’t you just use china for hollandaise sauces?
If you’re a heathen, you can.
WELL IF NO ONE ELSE IS GOING TO SAY IT THEN I WILL
Oh, no, there’s no plate like chrome for the hollandaise!
I love it!
oh my god
are you single/available btw asking for a friend
May your son avoid sentencing for last season’s misunderstanding only to write and produce a rap album.
May your golf pro be female, and may she beat you soundly on every single round.
And may her wife be hotter than yours.
PRECISELY.
May your child actually want to go to boarding school.
May your ex-wife marry a richer man than you are, who then goes on to be Ambassador to France
I didn’t even know what some of these things meant.
I googled Patek Phillipe and then said “JESUS” out loud at the prices.
The son in the ad on the right looks like he’s about to shit a Patek Phillipe.
ok that made me laugh out loud and you deserve to know
Seconded. Cackling over here!
thirded.
“patek” really does sound like some weird onomatopoeia for a splatty horse poop.
How did both of these dads score Draco Malfoy for a son?
And the son in the ad on the left looks like a shorter, yet still smug middle-aged man.
May your skiing holiday in Davos be negatively impacted by the World Economic Forum meeting.
addendum: May you never be invited to speak at a WEF meeting, or to join the organization itself.
And may the view out of your suite’s parlor window be ruined by protestors in parkas.
I love you 🙂
May your sons not understand what Bonds are.
Am I allowed to talk about everyday people curses here?
Because my favourite (and it would work for rich people, but must be said to their face) is: your tongue can now no longer find a comfortable position in your mouth.
It doesn’t need to be said to someone’s face. Thanks a lot…
May your chef quit the morning of your dinner party, to go work for your frenemy.
May your son actually face trial and earn appropriate punishments for his infractions, great and small.
May the trial uncover your own infractions.
May the pharmaceutical company in which you hold majority shares develop a costly treatment for affluenza, thereby creating a quandary where you have to choose between quashing the lucrative opportunity to push the medication onto the market or eliminating the condition from your options for defense pleas.
May the fountain of false laughter in response to your terrible ‘small talk’ jokes run dry.
For this one I picture Cal Hockley trying to make a joke and everyone around him merely staring blankly back at him.
May the Ferragamo flagship store in Florence lose the molds of your feet. May your subsequent pairs of shoes fit just well enough to make you hesitate about complaining, but not as well as they did before.
Oooh
Daaaaaaaaaamn
May you never receive an invitation to obtain an American Express Black Card.
May Rodney Dangerfield wander into your après-polo party.
May you always be the kind of rich person who has to buy their silver. (I heard this elsewhere, but it’s too good not to put in.)
ahah. This might be my favorite.
ohhhh burn! (says the person who has inherited family silver, smugly)
“May your children also have to buy their own silver.”
May the inaugural winner of your corporations Employee of the Year award (named after your grandfather) be a single mom that you tried to fire when she got pregnant.
May you be forced to have a frank discussion of your money and its antecedents with someone poorer than you.
Yay Mallory for giving OSHA a shout-out! Sadly for a lot of abused workers, though, housekeepers and other domestic employees generally aren’t covered by OSHA.
The good news is that four states — New York, Hawaii, California, and as of yesterday, Massachusetts — have passed domestic workers’ bills of rights. So, I propose changing curse #2 to “May the housekeeper at your Martha’s Vineyard retreat be fully aware of her rights under state law and know how to enforce them.”
This was my favourite, too 🙂
May your child work in non-profits.
“May your daughter remain waitlisted even after your generous donation to Harvard.”
Only the most powerful of wizards could pull off such an unbelievable feat.
May your decorator never truly understand your tastes.
Ha! or “May your decorator actually listen and agree to your requirements”
May your favorite horse never sire a Derby winner.
I was thinking “May your graded stakes winner accidentally get gelded.”
“May your daughter remain wait listed even after your generous donation to Harvard.” That happened to me! Granted, we weren’t actually rich; the donation was because my grandmother escaped Hitler’s Germany at fifteen and worked her way through Radcliffe, and when she died, in her fifties, my father used the money she left him to found a scholarship for refugees. Also I didn’t mention the scholarship on my application because I was obsessively ethical like that. But still!
PLEASE WRITE ABOUT THIS FOR US
I would love to write about it, but I think my grandmother did a better job of writing about her experience than I could ever do. (I’m guessing you’re more interested in my grandmother the refugee than in the tragic tale of me not getting into Harvard.) She and her mother wrote every day, because her mother sent her to England to keep her safe but stayed in Berlin herself for several more years. My father edited a collection of the letters and published them in Germany, but they haven’t been published in English yet. Would you be interested in any excerpts from the letters of a sixteen-year-old German-Jewish refugee living in London in the thirties?
Gonna go out on a limb here and suggest they’re proooobably pretty interested in the not-getting-into-Harvard, too.
May your children take up with the new type of gay marriage, forsaking all tradition in this regard.
May your daughter bring home a colored person. On the day of your book club.
May your restaurant reservation at Daniel get placed in the MIDDLE of the dining room.
May your charitable foundation be found embezzling money.
May your wealthier neighbor upstage you with a more extravagant purchase after you brag about yours.
speaking of rich people things- I went to a high school graduation recently (not mine) and someone’s parents hired a plane to SKYWRITE A CONGRATULATIONS ABOVE THE SCHOOL AND IT WAS SO FUCKING LOUD. Also at the reception the Hors d’oeuvres were way shittier than 10 yrs ago, when they gave out fans to each guest (it’s hot), had a cheese display, and mini sandwiches (this time it was mostly vegetables chips dips and cookies). We all have to make sacrifices after the recession I guess.
May you lose your dream girl to a wealthy man whom she resents.
May you become vastly, dubiously wealthy to win said girl back, and be rejected as noveau riche.
May your every party be attended by the beautiful people, and your funeral attended by precisely nobody.
You just Gatsbied, didn’t you.
May generation upon generation of teenagers be forced to read a book about you in high school and hate it.
May some of those teenagers quite like that book, actually, and go on to write overly earnest AP essays about your homoerotic relationship with your neighbor.
May your daughter get a nose ring
May your Montblanc be afflicted with hard starts and a scratchy nib.
May your florist forever send you bouquets of yellow and orange when SHE KNOWS your living room is pale pink.
(this actually happened. i was that florist)
May your stepson write a tell-all memoir.
May your husband bring home a teenager from Chino who moves into your pool house and befriends your son.
May your father marry your ex-fiance’s ex-wife.
May your son attend RISD rather than Brown.
May your siphoning of clients’ money to pay your own debts be discovered and force you to move to an apartment.
May your daughter be insufficiently interested in charity fashion shows.
May your daughter blackmail you to avoid counseling and prevent you from getting full custody.
May your second daughter be given storylines for some unfathomable reason.
May you return to your position as a public defender after your son burns down your father-in-law’s headquarters.
May your eyebrows grow ever bushier.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmd1qMN5Yo0
May your daughter at RISD fail to ensnare any boys from Brown. (This is me. This is my life).
If I ever become rich, I will clearly be in bad stead, because I only understood a handful of these. RICH PEOPLE HAVE THEIR OWN RICH PEOPLE LANGUAGE, is my main takeaway here.
You know you’re trash when you have to spend an hour on wikipedia just to to understand jokes about rich people.
May your FANCY NOUN encounter a FANCY VERBING NOUN in your FANCY NAME FOR CARPORT (do rich people have carports?)
Ha yeaaaah I thought most of the proper nouns in this piece were made up by Mallory… turns out, nope, I just inhabit the wrong cultural milieu!
Port cochere is probably close enough to carport.
Moe: The ‘garage’? Hey fellas, the ‘garage’! Well ooh la-de-da Mr French man!
Homer: Well what do YOU call it?
Moe: A car hole.
May you be forced to take a job at a milliners’.
Oh Lily.
Team LB forever.
ETA: Also this piece (http://www.theawl.com/2010/05/the-house-of-mirth-as-a-poorly-played-game-of-choose-your-own-adventure) by our very own Nicole is genius and must be mentioned in any HoM discussion.
When I read HoM at age 20, I was filled with sympathy for LB. I re-read a few months ago at 35 and felt nothing but scorn. SELDEN, you fool!
May you collapse in horror upon reading this piece, consumed by the fear that even a single one of these things might actually happen to you.
I love when Mallory writes things that troll the online advertisers.
OH MY GOD
I fell down the internet hole and found you all this: “A Requim for Finger Bowls:; http://www.socialregisteronline.com/#!fingerbowls…
May Aunt Edith find the lack of finger bowls at your most recent dinner party a disgusting show of generational disrespect.
Does anyone with a real computer know if you can pirate the social register?
May your TED talk go over 18 minutes.
May your friends sour at your lemon britches
You guys laugh, but that last one shook me to my spine. The concentration of DJs per capita in the SF bay area literally keeps me up at night. This is, no doubt, the nefarious influence from the Continent
On the day of your wedding at St. Bart’s may you develop a tip-of-the-nose pimple! May all your modern art be from Knoedler & Co. May your real identity in your latest romantic endeavors be revealed in TMZ, WSJ and Town and Country, exposing you as Chester the Happy, Yiffing Squirrel. May Graydon Carter honor your family with an illustrated spread about your parents’ S&M adventures in Monaco after the war.
May your diamond-encrusted iPhone case partially obstruct the adaptor port.
May your daughter be fat.
I don’t know if this bothers you guys or not, but this whole article was reprinted here: http://www.omgblog.com/2014/07/omg_deep_pocketed_…
They do link to your site, but since you can read the whole article on their site there isn’t much point.
Thank you!!!!
Typically, one would ask the help to wash the fine china by hand, so as not to chip it.