PARODY
"The lords and ladies who weekend in Connecticut's rural Litchfield County believe in homegrown— but not homespun—gifts. Oscar de la Renta sends jams and jellies made from currants, crab apples and...
...Day after day, Oscar heard of families leaving the county and heading East to the Vineyard or the Cape...
...So for now, Oscar de la Renta hung on...
...Ralph used to get some of his best sp°rtswear ideas during those afternoons...
...But this was his land...
...When the weather was exceptionally fine they'd all go down to Greenwich where Ralph Lauren kept a herd of Protestants...
...House & Garden, September 1998 THE VINTAGES OF WRATH by John Steinbeck It was a hot, dry, remorseless wind...
...Sometimes Oscar dreamed of giving up too, saying goodbye to the currants and the merlots...
...For a time, he'd had the best chutney farm in the whole county...
...Somewhere Willie Nelson was weeping...
...He would die on this land (unless his Realtor could unload it on a software executive...
...These were free-range Protestants...
...Oscar would bring some crab-apple jelly in an old Saks bag, and in exchange Nancy Kissinger would give him a helicopter...
...It swept over the peaks of Litchfield County and slammed with parched fury into the soil of Oscar de la Renta's Brook Hill Farm...
...Most of the arugula farms had been abandoned...
...And the dust...
...Each day Oscar rose at dawn and peered through the windows of his tattered Stanford White farmhouse, grimly watching as his precious soil blew away...
...On Sundays they'd get out the old Lexus and go visiting over at the Kissingers...
...They'd lounge about the veranda sipping mimosas and watch the Protestants munch surf'n'tarf on the hillside...
...He used to till his lush fields and look across the valley and see Bffl Blass working his pesto ranch...
...Even the framboise bushes were brown and lifeless...
...They were a tribe of wandering nomads, the Arugulans stoyrng at the Pierre in New York one month and up in Newport the next...
...One man with courage, fortitude, and three closets full of tuxedos...
...Oscar de la Renta sends jams and jellies made from currants, crab apples and raspberries that grow at Brook Hill Farm...
...The dust was everywhere—in the George 111 tulipwood and marquetry commodes, in the Chippendale dining-room sets, all about the Regency breakfront cabinets...
...But an evil wind had descended on the land, drying up stream beds, covering the swimming pools with an ugly layer of griL George plimpton complained that there were now more sand traps than water hazards on his private course...
...His lone remaining tractor—a John de la Deere—sat rusting in the middle of the devastation...
...Oscar knew the farm was lost...
Vol. 4 • October 1998 • No. 7
