No Putting on the Ritz on Park Avenue, just the Smell of Money

I don't like dropping names, but my first visit to a real Upper East Side Park Avenue apartment was to see one Barbara Tuchman, who wrote a bunch of best sellers years ago based on a lot of serious historical research.

I was with my friend ( well, name dropping wise, here we go again) Deborah Eisenberg, a writer who is a "MacArthur Genius" and was teaching at Columbia the last time I looked. 

To top it off, her partner is Wally Shawn, the avant garde playwright..

These are not names the general public knows but they carry great cachet ( love that word, as I have said) in higher literary circles.

Mrs. Tuchman's swell Park Avenue digs included, of course, a library filled with books..
Oh yes, we were there because Debby's older brother had married Barbara's daughter...

To make the name thing worse, I later told this to one Mr. Richard Avedon, who for a while I was once kind of related to ( my stepmother's niece had married his son).

I mentioned Debby to him and he said he would probably get her photo some day. He did, too, I saw it in a group photo of writers/artists he had in some magazine.

Now that I think about it, this name dropping is not very impressive because you have to be pretty old to have any idea of who the photographer Richard Avedon was...

I wish I could say something about partying with Lady Gaga, that would really boost my cultural ( well at least Pop Cultural) Cred.