Does Elite Memphis, the Bluff City’s glossy society mag known for its glamorous party pix and sterling editorial well, at least for its glamorous party pix go to the trouble of verifying any of those glowing letters to the editor that they seem to receive by the boatload? We’re guessing no, and here’s why. The current issue contains a missive whose origins are dubious, to say the least. The writer, who claims to be from New Orleans, begins her epistle with a perky “Just wanted to let you know how much I just love your magazine!” Nothing special there, since so many letters to Elite begin this way. Everyone loves Elite, no? It continues, “You guys do a great job making people look beautiful. Good color, white teeth, great clothes. What a confederacy of sophisticates you are” The letter is signed Myra Minkoff. Hmmm. NEW ORLEANS? CONFEDERACY OF SOPHISTICATES? MYRA MINKOFF? Oh, Elite, you have been duped by a satirist whose cleverness has even the wicked, wicked Fly turning green with envy. After all, John Kennedy Toole’s famed posthumous novel A Confederacy of Dunces, a fictional if all- too-accurate account of life in the French Quarter, has a prominent character named Myrna (not Myra, mind you) Minkoff, a musky minx whose political orations could make a man wield his “crabbed organ like a club of despair.” Of course, Toole’s book only won a Pulitzer; it’s not like anyone has actually read the darn thing.
Categories
