The Hamptons

Postscript note: This guy is not me. The photo is here for the guy’s forced smile, the image of the woman digging it, and for the blank stare on everybody else’s faces.

I’ve got an in-law cousin who has done well for himself in New York City. He’s a good guy who now owns some property in the Hamptons. He was good enough to provide us a house for a week; the wife was big on going. So here we are.

Observations:

1. Men in their sixties wearing tight yellow biking shorts look like idiots. There have been three of these guys pass through in twenty minutes.
2. Men in their sixties with pony-tails can pull it off if they are biker-types, or truckers, or Willie Nelson. The ones with white socks and high-riding clean white pressed shorts at the coffee shop look like idiots.
3. The plastic to-go bags in this coffee shop are the same yellow-smiley face ‘have a nice day’ bags that a local ammunition dealer uses back home.
4. There are attractive women here. But there is nothing more disappointing than seeing a lady who you would like to think of as a example of a strong American woman, when you see her going over celebrity pictures in Us Magazine.
5. I’m ready to go back to Proleville where local zoning laws don’t ban McDonalds. Something isn’t right here.

Here’s a datapoint:

The popular Hampton Social concert series, which featured Prince, Dave Matthews, Billy Joel, Tom Petty and James Taylor at the Ross School in East Hampton, will not run this year. Warner Music Group, which bought Bulldog Entertainment, the Joe Meli-owned firm that created the concerts, for $6 million, lost $18 million on the deal, an insider said. “Warner was planning to take the high-end concert idea to Aspen, Dubai and Monaco but couldn’t sell tickets. The rich people they are targeting all have connections to get tickets for free, so no one was buying.”