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Timothy Noah and Marjorie Williams

the breakfast table
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from: Marjorie Williams

That's Am-ore

Posted Monday, July 13, 1998, at 6:37 PM ET

Good going, Tim: now we've made remarks offensive to French people and Italians in a single day. But I love the Amish story, too: it's irresistible to peek beneath the burnished surface of those lives. (At least, of the tourist-cum-"Witness" version that we all think we know.) What I don't understand is why young Amish men, having tasted the fruits of freedom, don't bail out of the clan by the dozens at the end of their rumpspringa? (Or what would the plural of that word be?) My favorite part of Remnick's piece was its disquisition on Amish mating rituals. Apparently stage one is that you go for three walks together, while your family formally pretends not to notice, at the end of which you are going steady; and then you play board games in the kitchen until rapture compels you to wed.

Your comparison to House-of-Windsor obsessives, however, seems a tad mean. The Amish are actual people with actual lives--even if , as Remnick writes, they are sometimes approached by tourists who ask, "Are you real?" Whereas Britain's monarchy is mostly a social construct, and only incidentally the life story of a tiny band of inbred men and women with overbites. (Now this is a brand of intolerance in which you can't possible outdo me. I am, after all, the founder of Adult Children of Anglophiles.)

I feel compelled by a couple of reader inquiries to clear something up. Several kind souls wrote in to wonder whether your Friday announcement that you'd left your job was, er, the first I'd heard of it. I can see the thought balloons over their heads: can he really just have dropped this bomb on his wife by E-mail? I assure them that we had talked it out in advance. It remains to be seen whether the artificiality of the Breakfast Table will reach a breaking point now that we're in fact sending each other e-mail from across the same room in Washington, D.C., by way of Seattle. (Okay, Redmond.) But I'm looking forward to seeing a lot of you for a while.

Near-ly,

Marjorie

the breakfast table
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from: Marjorie Williams

That's Am-ore

Posted Monday, July 13, 1998, at 6:37 PM ET
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Timothy Noah writes Slate's "Chatterbox" column. Marjorie Williams is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair.
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