At an elite prep school, the devil wears Lilly Pulitzer pink.
When Wade Rouse, who grew up more Hee-Haw than Dynasty, was hired as the director of publicity at the prestigious Tate Academy, he quickly discovered his real job: to make the very pretty, very rich, very mean mommies of the elite students very happy.
Enter Wade s VIP volunteer and perfectly coiffed nightmare, former beauty queen and sports star Katherine Isabelle Ludington Kitsy to her friends. In between designing Louis Vuitton inspired reunion invitations, dressing as Ronald Reagan for Halloween, and surviving surprise...

We all dream it.
Wade Rouse actually did it.
Finally fed up with the frenzy of city life and a job he hates, Wade Rouse decided to make either the bravest decision of his life or the worst mistake since his botched Ogilvie home perm: to uproot his life and try, as Thoreau did some 160 years earlier, to "live a plain, simple life in radically reduced conditions."
In this rollicking and hilarious memoir, Wade and his partner, Gary, leave culture, cable, and consumerism behind and strike out for rural Michigan a place with fewer people than in their former spinning class....

How come the only thing my family tree ever grows is nuts?

Wade Rouse attempts to answer that question in his blisteringly funny new memoir by looking at the yearly celebrations that unite us all and bring out the very best and worst in our nearest and dearest.
Family is truly the only gift that keeps on giving namely, the gifts of dysfunction and eccentricity
and Wade Rouse s family has been especially charitable: His chatty yet loving mother dresses her son
as a Ubangi tribesman, in blackface, for Halloween in the rural Ozarks; his unconventional engineer of
a...