Idle chat turned to real estate during rehearsal, something that didn’t matter before we became parents and found out we don’t live in good school districts.
We were leafing through the glossy New York Family magazines available in the lobby of the Manhattan Children’s Theatre, there in Tribeca. They were full of ads for multi-million dollar apartments and private schools and articles about “Kid Culture in the Hamptons”.
One of the other mommies expressed frustration with her job and the difficulties of combining work and nursing a baby. She was incredulous that a co-worker blythely suggested she reduce her stress level by hiring a nanny. Classic BPP (Bitter Poor Person) thinking in the lexicon of New York urbanbaby.com
I once read a post on that message board asking: “How much money do you normally spend on personal grooming? The original poster confessed to “about $2000 per month including haircuts, manicures, waxing, and massages….” The UB chat rooms are famous for obsessive school comparison shopping. Other threads question how many people need to be hired to “staff a party” and whether it is physically possible to live in New York on less than 200 thousand dollars per year.
A different friend of mine was once asked at a job interview (publishing) if she expected to live on the salary. As a matter of fact she did. Now if she took the job, because she majored in English hoping to work for a publishing company in New York, and then ended up resenting her diet of peanut butter and ramen while others with the same job went out every night and wore fashionable clothes and then she would be a BPP.
New York is hard because there are so many people in this city who have sources of money other than their paychecks.