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DEAR Miss MANNERS: I want my kids to feel that I am their friend, but I can't make them understand why l can't stand it when they and their friends call me "Pops" and tell me to get snacks for them and . . . turn on the television when I'm trying to read the paper . . .
GENTLE READER: If you took the role of the father, you wouldn 't have to, because you could set the rules. Why don't you?
Despite Miss Manners' spartan dedication, it seems hard to believe that the perplexed readers who write her 10,000 letters a year are really inspired by either idealism or altruism. Yuppies, in particular, are pragmatic people who expect a dollar's value for a dollar spent. Such expectations apply to etiquette guides too. As Marjabelle Stewart puts it, "In today's competitive society, manners are a matter of survival."
That is why Cartoonist Hamilton, who has just finished a book titled Up in Class, was so struck by the black-tie yuppies' dinner with no servants in attendance. "Everything I can see in the way of new manners is very ersatz and copied, very nostalgic for something they've gotten from old movies, from some hopeful rumor of a more distinguished period in which to live," says Hamilton. "They're just dressing up. They all love suspenders, art deco, fragments of an earlier grandeur, and that's the new conservatism. Reagan isn't the cause but just another symptom of the urge to find some order."
Even when there are no promotions or pay increases immediately involved, today's etiquette is often based on the struggle for status, or what Californians like to call "personal space." At a chromed and carpeted temple of body worship on Santa Monica Boulevard, for example, everybody scrupulously obeys certain unwritten rules. No more than three swimmers are allowed in each lap lane. It is rude to swim the backstroke unless the swimmer is alone in the lane. "Neo-manners" is what Cynthia Heimel calls such rituals. "There don't seem to be enough resources for everyone."
Or consider the elbowing at the most elaborate California dinner parties. "People consider it chic to arrive late," says Wallis Annenberg, stepdaughter of the celebrated curtsier. "This is the land of the grand entrance, and God forbid that the audience isn't assembled when one arrives." In a variant ploy, the guest arrives on time but then immediately asks to use the telephone for "an urgent business conference" and disappears for an hour.
Even the current preoccupation with healthy diets can become a form of skirmishing. Television Producer Irwin Rosten now asks his guests what they do and do not eat when he invites them to dinner; this can get quite complicated when the guests not only observe various religious dietary rules but shun salt or white bread or refined sugar. So many have given up red meat that Stacey Winkler no longer serves it unless she knows in advance that all her guests eat it. At large dinners, she says, she offers several smaller dishes at each course. Says Annenberg: "Some people are like nannies, saying, 'You should watch your cholesterol,' or 'Watch your salt.' I think it's very bad manners."