Courtesy of Ladue Yacht Club
That famous St. Louis query, “Where’d you go to high school?,” cuts two ways. The innocuous interpretation is something along the lines of “Oh, so you’re from the ____ area? Maybe we have a mutual friend, _____? Did you ever eat a hamburger at _____?” And thusly, the ice has been broken.
The not-so-innocuous shade of meaning conjures a provincialism that rankles. What is said is decidedly not what is heard. To the recipient of the “Where’d you go to high school?” query, the thoughts run to “Ah, yes, let’s talk about what part of town our parents settled in, so that we can prejudge each other based on socioeconomic status. Let’s establish a pecking order, not unlike, say, life amongst wild dogs—who’s running with the alphas, and who’s, er, sniffing butts from the back of the pack? That is what we’re getting at here, right? …Friend?”
Sound harsh? Maybe, but let’s be honest—from tiny rural towns to the biggest city, provincialism can be found in every province, and it probably lives to some degree within us all.
That’s a philosophy you might consider adopting when reading the “Ladue Yacht Club” page on Facebook.
The Ladue Yacht Club lampoons the denizens of the famously wealthy suburb by imagining such typical scenarios as a Ladueite who “tripped over my pet leopard and broke my squash racket. On my way to France to get a new one for tonight’s game.” A private, members-only Ladue restaurant serves “cockatoo wings deep-fried in baby seal oil” to the strains of the house band, the “White Flight Jazz Trio.” The men all have names like “Woodsworth,” “Wigglesworth,” and “Tittsworth,” and they have their own private airport “because St. Louis County refused us the rights to build a 10 mile bridge over St. Ann.”
The creator of this sick hilarity is Brian Rehg, who lives in Swansea, Ill., and—here we go—graduated from Belleville East High.
“I’ve always worked in the West County area and people always talked about Ladue like it was royalty, the royalty of St. Louis,” he says. “About 10 years ago I made a joke that I wanted to be in the Mardi Gras parade on a ‘Ladue Yacht Club’ float and dress in ‘80s preppy clothes and harass people and act like a dick. Last Easter I got laid off from a creative agency and I was sitting around and I made a Facebook page and hundreds of people signed on.”
Though the Mardi Gras parade-float idea remains untried, nearly a thousand fans have “liked” the Ladue Yacht Club’s Facebook page, added hundreds of pictures of the wealthy acting snooty, made wisecracks, and given themselves absurd, blueblood-ey names like “Morrison Silverbow” with the Ladue Yacht Club Name Generator, a Facebook app devised by Rehg. Ladue Yacht Club T-shirts and commemorative deck shoes, which are, naturally, as white as William F. Buckley, are available for purchase, too.
As far as provincialism goes, Rehg says, “I grew up in a low-income neighborhood in Illinois surrounded by trailers, but as poor as we were, we looked down at people in Granite City as trash. But people looked at us that way, too. Everybody does it.”
But not everybody does it in such an over-the-top way that, as in the notorious dirty joke at the core of the film The Aristocrats, it’s so obviously offensive that it may cease to become offensive at all.
Rehg has imagined a secret world inside Ladue comprised of a private lake ringed by a circle of castles, occupied by a klatch of billionaires who live for the pleasures of mocking their neighbors. “They consider Clayton a ghetto and Chesterfield white trash,” explains Rehg. “Wildwood and Frontenac are [occupied by] low-income undesirables. Other cities are not worth mentioning.” (Notable status updates include “What is a Creve Coeur?” and “What is an Olivette? It sounds absolutely wretched.”)
The LYC’s secret restaurant, called Ohlendorf’s, is where the elite meet to consume “panda steaks.” The swank dining experience also features a “Mimosa Bar” where the community’s wayward trust-fund babies are continually passing out—but hey, such are the venial sins of the pampered, right? (Wink, wink!)
Two more of those scorching status updates:
“Live tigers, cheetahs and chinchillas have been flown into Ladue this past weekend. Stop by… and design your new fall coat, hat, boots, skirt etc. Designers and butchers are on hand from 6am-9pm to assist you with your animal. We also have smaller animals on hand so that the LYC kids can create delightful fall coats.”
And “Perfunctoriness 101 - tolerating the misfortunes of others. A class on how to tolerate the misfortunes of others will be held at Tenderknob Winery this morning.”
So, has there been any blowback from the actual residents of Ladue? For the most part, no.
“There was a bunch of people from Clayton who wrote some nasty stuff on the page,” says Rehg. “And I have a few stories about the Ladue News. I don’t think they like me over there.”
But, really, the response has been that loads of people want to join up and crack jokes at the expense of the rich, too.
In fact, Rehg has parlayed the attention into starting his own successful company, Blue Stingray Interactive, which makes “Facebook apps and web apps and games,” he says. “And I’ve become friends in real life with my hardcore fans.”
Rehg’s description of a world fit for Richie Rich, complete with diamond rainstorms, is just a hoot. But for some, his biting, incisive humor may touch a nerve.
Look at it this way—being wealthy confers all sorts of privilege. For the rest of us, wielding a mordant wit to tweak those in power is surely the most venial of sins.
And it seems that making fun of those whom we imagine to be richer—as well as poorer—than ourselves is a human foible. Rehg just happens to be very good at it.
By Byron Kerman (Ladue High School, Class of ‘89)
