New Hampshire?

As a kid my family moved around a fair amount -- teachers always asked me if my father was in the military or the diplomatic service. (Nope.) Mostly it was that secretly, I believe, my mother must have gypsy blood in her veins. I like to imagine the circumstances. So exciting!

But for explaining why I attended so many schools: a problem. I was in fact a good girl and a very strong student. We just ... moved a lot. Mine was not to reason why. Mine was but to do, or else.

But.

When I was in seventh grade, at my Next New School (a perfectly lovely Quaker school in Philadelphia), I was yet again the New Girl in the class. New Girls were inevitably assigned to a Teacher's Pet (the most popular, smartest, prettiest girl) to be given orientation. Don't ask, it's just how things went.

So the pudgy but otherwise intelligent pre-teen Polly fell under the power of "Mimi," this SuperGirl. Suffice it to say I never made the grade socially (oh god, middle school), and was assured of many years of presumed and justified inadequacy anywhere within in a 50-mile radius of this cool, lithe, 13-year-old blonde success story. The Girl You Love To Hate.

Fast forward 30 years. I bump into Mimi's brother at a noisy New England fundraiser. "What's your sister up to these days?" I query.

In the hubbub of the crowd, I think that I hear him say, "blah blah blah....in New Hampshire..."

Heh heh heh.

Soooo, I think. The former blonde vixen is now living in New Hampshire. Justified or not, Bostonians delight in forging crass, unsophisticated images of New Hampshirites. I thus conjure up, with vengeful glee, the mental portrait of a Mimi transformed into a manure-shovelling unshaven backwoods hippie. I revel in picturing her with swarms of unkempt children fighting over who has to bring in the firewood. Dirty fingernails and bad grammar. Walmart clothes. Ah. I feel relieved, redeemed.

"Where in New Hampshire?" I ask coyly.

"No, no, it's Amsterdam. And Paris," he corrects me. "She has an international interior design firm. It was on the cover of Architectural Digest last month."

Oh.

Guess who I haven't looked up in Paris?