Vive Le Castle: 'A Middle-Class Interloper Spends An Evening Hobnobbing With Billionaires'

Castle Dinner Fundraiser

In the spring of 2011, my wife and I were invited to attend a fundraiser for a well-known European castle. We hadn’t donated any money to the group ourselves—we didn’t even know that castles had fundraisers. But a well to do colleague had given some money—a lot of money, really—and he was unable to attend this very intimate dinner for the big donors. So he asked us to go in his place. The benefit was attended by about only about 25 people, among them various aristocrats, patrons of the arts, billionaires and us: a middle class couple from suburban New Jersey. It was, for lack of a better term, bananas.

Noah Rosenberg, founder and editor-in-chief or Narratively, and I speak about the evening in this recording.

Narratively is a digital publication devoted to original, true and in-depth stories. Each week they focus on a theme, and publish stories relating to that theme. This week's theme is The Upper Crust. Explore more stories on Narrative.ly, like this great one

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Edited by Matthew Petrillo

Illustration by Larry Buchanon

This originally appeared on Narrative.ly.