T A B L E_T A L K Have you ever seen a passenger go berserk on a plane? Share your tales of air rage in the Wanderlust area of Table Talk R E C E N T L Y Afoot in the South African bush By Lance Gould A New Yorker ventures on a walking safari into the wild world of wildebeest, Cape buffalo and dung beetles (11/30/98) The Khan men of Agra By Pamela Michael In India, a moment of trust opens the door to a traveler's richest reward (11/25/98) The rabbis of Bangkok, Part Two By Douglas A. Konecky A live sex show reveals more than flesh to an American musician in Thailand (11/24/98) The rabbis of Bangkok By Douglas A. Konecky A traveling Jewish band from California meets a trio of Hasidic Jews in the teeming city of Live Sex Shows and Thai Full Body Massage (11/23/98) This week in travel A new U.S. passport, a fictitious country in the South Pacific and a buyout of Reno Air (11/20/98) Browse the Wanderlust Feature archives Wanderlust's Official Travel Book Partner S A L O N E M P O R I U M FREE! 12-ounce bag of Salon Blend with a purchase of $30 or more. While supplies last.		The belles of St. Mary's ------ A Jewish writer learns about the Old South, and herself, in the most unlikely of places -- at a reunion of former debs and sorority girls. BY JENNIFER MOSES | I'm trying to explain to the pretty, slightly tipsy, blue-eyed and blond-haired woman who has been telling me about her school days that, in fact, I myself am not a graduate of the St. Mary's School. I'm telling her, somewhat awkwardly, that I have merely come to the reunion as my friend Sarah's "date," but the minute the word "date" is out of my mouth, I realize that I may have made a semantic boo-boo. Indeed, the woman (Class of '52) blinks rapidly behind her glasses, and then says -- in the broad, flattened vowels and up-and-down cadences of the Old South -- "Well, aren't you girls lucky to have each other then?" "Yes we are," I say. We're in the dining room of a lovely old house that typifies New Orleans' Uptown neighborhood with its high ceilings, crown molding and gleaming, wide floorboards and canopy beds. Around me, the St. Mary's girls coo and laugh, their musical voices hanging in the humid air. But this whole deal, frankly, is weird. Why, indeed, had I agreed to schlep all the way from the comfort of my husband and kids in Baton Rouge to New Orleans for this gathering of assorted former debs and sorority girls, none of whom, as far as I can tell, has ever met a Jew (which is what I am)? Not that you can tell a person's religious or ethnic bona fides just by looking, but as I stand there grinning stupidly in an effort to blend in, I find myself hurling back to the fourth grade, when my best friend invited me to join her and her family for an afternoon of upper-crust fun at the then-restricted Chevy Chase Club just outside Washington. Her mother had to get some kind of special permission for me to tag along, so that by the time we were actually there, I felt so self-conscious that I got a stomach ache and had to go lie down, and when at last I felt better, I thought that everyone was looking at me, with my dark brown curly hair and dark brown eyes and "Mediterranean" skin, and thinking: "What's the little kike doing here?" This time around, to top things off, I'm ravenously hungry, but -- as the sole Jew in South Louisiana who keeps kosher -- I see there isn't much here that I can eat. Fortunately, one of the husbands of one of the St. Mary's girls has already seen to it that I'm well supplied with vodka, so I don't notice it so much when I get that old, queasy, reject feeling in the pit of my stomach, which is making all kinds of loud noises. Plus I'm no longer a kid. I'm about three seconds shy of the age my mother was when she had her midlife crisis, so what do I care if the people gathered here think I'm Sarah's Yankee Jewish lesbian lover? A girl, after all, could do far worse. "Hello," someone says from behind me. I turn to see another blue-eyed, once-blond former deb. She introduces herself, then says, "Class of '49." The truth is, when Sarah asked me to accompany her to this gathering of New Orleans-based graduates of the St. Mary's School (an Episcopalian girls school in Raleigh, N.C.), my first thought was: You have got to be kidding me. But what I said was, "Huh?" Sarah went on to explain that St. Mary's is not only where she was educated for the two years after high school because in the '60s the University of North Carolina didn't admit women as freshman, but it was also where her own mother, in whose veins flow generations of blue Virginia blood, had gone. The school was founded in 1842 and for years educated the aristocratic daughters of the really truly Old South, like Jefferson Davis' daughter. I still wasn't convinced, however, that I wanted to go to a reunion of St. Mary's blue-hairs. But then Sarah pointed out -- speaking in the Southern tones so deep that every time I hear her I can't help but picture white-columned plantation houses serviced by an army of slaves -- that the event would provide me with "deep background" for the novel I'm trying to write, the one that's been ruining my life for the past several decades, but will all be worth it the minute it wins a National Book Award and I get to be interviewed on NPR. I'd told Sarah about my novel, which, like me, is set in Baton Rouge, but, unlike me, revolves around a family of white aristocratic Catholics who live in a big house filled with chintz and French furniture, and a poor black family whose housing accommodations are not nearly so luxe. "The South is not like the North," Sarah had said on the drive over. No kidding, I think now, as I explain, for the third or fourth time in 15 minutes, that I myself am not a St. Mary's girl -- as if you can't tell by looking at my frizzy brown hair and definitely non-Episcopalian nose -- but that I'd come as my friend's date. N E X T+P A G E | Hasn't this guy ever heard of "personal space"?