Auction Item

Jen and I went to the benefit auction for our kid’s school last night, an event which performs the same function in the lives of middle-aged private school parents as did the occasional night of hard drug abuse in our lives before we had children: you get together with a group of people you know tangentially; you get all frenzied up and you find yourself saying and doing things you’ll later regret, until you wake up the next morning shocked with how much money you spent and vowing never to do that again.

We had an okay time, though, and got to feel good that it was all “for the kids,” even though, I felt sort of weirded out by the whole phenomenon of people bidding hundreds of dollars for things they didn’t even want just to be able to say they were willing to pay more for them than another person in the room. But hey, it’s all “for the kids,” so more power to them. That is, us.

We did win a “kayak extravaganza” in a raffle; I’m not sure what that entails, but generally, I’m all for extravaganzas, especially if they involve water.

I was hoping for one of those ego battles you hear about at these events for fancy private schools in Manhattan, where two investment bankers go checkbook-to-checkbook over some classroom project or another, bidding it up to tens of thousands of dollars just to prove who has the bigger dick. Mimi’s school apparently doesn’t have enough Microsoft-millionaire parents to get this dynamic going, or maybe it’s just people being “too nice” in Seattle to really go at it this way.

One parent I talked to last night told me about a Seattle school that is abandoning the auction altogether; instead of having the gala event, parents just write checks in their kids’ names.

I suppose that could work, but then I wouldn’t feel so lousy today, and what fun is that?