The Perfect Yuppie

Many people already know that the letters YUP stand for “young urban
professional.” Young in this context is understood to mean thirtyish; urban often
means suburban; and professional means most definitely college-educated. Double P
and add an I and an E at the end, and you get yuppie—that’s 1980s bourgeois, the
marketers’ darling, and the 1960s inheritance. But let’s not generalize. Not every
forty-year-old suburban college graduate qualifies as a yuppie. Nor is every yuppie
in his or her forties. True yuppiness involves much more than the words that make
up the acronym. Being the little sister of a couple of yups, I am in an especially good
position to define the perfect yuppie. I watched two develop.
The essence of yuppiness is generally new money. In the yuppie’s defense, I
will admit that most yuppies have worked hard for their money and social status.
Moreover, the baby boom of which they are a part has caused a glut of job seekers in
their age bracket, forcing them to be competitive if they want all the nice things
retailers have designed for them. But with new money comes an interesting
combination of wealth, naïveté, and pretentiousness.
For example, most yuppies worthy of the title have long ago traded in their
fringed suede jackets for fancy fur coats. Although they were animal rights activists
in the 1960s, they will not notice the irony of this change. In fact, they may be
shameless enough to parade in their fur coats—fashion-show style—for friends and
family. Because of their “innocence,” yuppies generally will not see the vulgarity of
their actions.
Because they are often quite wealthy, yuppies tend to have a lot of “things.”
They are simply overwhelmed by the responsibility of spending all that money. For
example, one yup I know has fourteen pairs of sunglasses and seven watches. She,
her husband, and their three children own at least twenty collections of everything
from comic books to Civil War memorabilia. Most yuppies have so much money that
I often wonder why the word “yuppie” does not have a dollar sign in it somewhere.
Perhaps in an effort to rid themselves of this finical burden, all good yuppies
go to Europe as soon as possible. Not Germany or France or Portugal, mind you, but
Europe. They do not know what they are doing there and thus generally spend much
more money than they need to—but, after all, no yuppie ever claimed to be frugal.
Most important, they bring home slides of Europe and show them to everyone they
know. A really good yuppie will forget and will show you his or her slides more than
once. Incidentally, when everyone has seen the slides of Europe twice, the yuppie’s
next stop is Australia.
A favorite past time of the yuppies is having wine-tasting parties for their
yuppie friends. At these parties, they must make a great to-do about tasting the
wine, cupping their faces over the glass with their palms (as if they were having a
facial), and even sniffing the cork, for goodness sake. I once knew a yuppie who did
not understand that a bottle of wine could not be rejected simply because he found
he “did not like that kind.” Another enjoyed making a show of having his wife choose
and taste the wine occasionally, which they both though was adorable.
Some yuppie wanna-be’s drive red or black BMWs, but don’t let them fool
you. A genuine, hard-core yuppie will usually own a gold or silver Volvo station
wagon. In this yuppie-mobile, the yuppie wife will chauffeur her young yupettes to
and from their modeling classes, track meets, ballet, the manicurist, and the boy
scouts, for the young yuppie is generally as competitive and socially active as his or
her parents. On the same topic, one particularly annoying trait of yuppie parents is
bragging about their yupettes. You know yuppies by the fact that they have the
smartest, most talented children in the world. They will show you their kids’ report
cards, making sure you notice any improvements from last quarter.
Perhaps I have been harsh in my portrayal of the perfect yuppie, and,
certainly, I will be accused by some of stereotyping. But consider this: I never
classify people as yuppies who do not classify themselves. The ultimate criterion for
being yuppies is that they will always proudly label themselves as such.

(© 1987, Prentice Hall)