Growing Up With Rich Kids Made Me Feel Rich, Too

I went to a private Montessori school in Atlanta from preschool through the third grade that my middle-class parents were able to pay for with a scholarship that I got for doing extremely well on little-kid-level standardized tests. The majority of the families that sent their children there were very well-off.

There was a lot of excess around me but I was young, so I just took it all in stride. My earliest and most vivid memories are of school events and visiting my friends at their homes. At school, we went to the Ritz Carlton for high tea when we learned about England. For "France Day," the school would hire fancy chefs who made fresh beignets for everyone and served them in a little café that the school set up outside. For "Italy Day," we would make fresh pasta and pose for pictures in a real gondola. There was a yearly auction of the various crafts and paintings we had created that would raise hundreds of thousands of dollars for the school.

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