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DEAR Miss MANNERS: What am I supposed to say when I am introduced to a homosexual "couple "?
GENTLE READER: "How do you do?" "How do you do?"
The triumph of Miss Manners is both a cause and a consequence of something stirring in the American subconscious. Since etiquette is largely symbolic of manners, and since manners stylistically express what people think about other people, the revived interest in what used to be called proper behavior implies a new sense of what behavior should be.
The evidence takes many forms. Clothing is becoming a bit more formal, more traditional, more conventional. Young men are getting their hair cut short. "One minute I was wearing Betsey Johnson sex clothes, the next I only had eyes for a nice Burberry," wrote Style Columnist Cynthia Heimel in Manhattan's Village Voice this month. "And gray flannel pleated trousers. Harris-tweed jackets. Simple shirtwaists in unsullied cotton . . . You know what this means, don't you? It means that people are going to be voting for Ronald Reagan again."
Eating and entertaining are becoming more elaborate, in sometimes confused ways. New Yorker Cartoonist William Hamilton, a sharp-eyed chronicler of manners, recalls being invited to a black-tie dinner with a group of typical yuppies, nervously ambitious professionals in their late 20s—but there were no servants. "Wearing black tie and cooking your own dinner is like make-believe," says Hamilton. "It's like the whole nation is trying to reinvent the 1930s, including '30s manners and mannerisms." Over brandy and cigars the host complained that his "greatest problem was when his father came by on his motorcycle with his latest old lady."
Mating rituals on the college campus are reacquiring a rich patina of hypocrisy. "College students are much more conservative now than they used to be," says Lisa Birnbach, co-author of The Official Preppy Handbook and now creator of Lisa Birnbach's College Book. "There's more dating, more courtship, a return of women's 'reputations' and the good old double standard. People are still sneaking around to have sexual relations, but they don't talk about it. It's viewed as kind of'icky.' "
Debutante cotillions are back, and nightclubs (the Latin Quarter is reopening on Broadway in November) and old-fashioned weddings (at $10,000 and up). "The extravagant second marriage is a phenomenon not seen ten years ago," says the president of a Long Island firm that deals with such occasions. "The same people who wed in blue jeans and flower garlands back in the '60s and '70s are remarrying in tuxedos and long white dresses in the '80s." Says Paul Lichtner, manager of the Arthur Murray dance studio in Boston: "We have a two-week waiting list for wedding couples who want to learn how to waltz." Letitia Baldrige, author of the revised and expanded Amy Vanderbilt Complete Book of Etiquette, concludes that "the flower generation tore tradition to shreds, but in the 1980s some magic sewing machine has stitched it all up again."
DEAR Miss MANNERS: I am remarrying my ex-husband . . . How do I inform the proper relatives . . . and not appear to be asking for gifts?