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"  The regency hotel&amp;#039;s breakfast room on Park Avenue in Manhattan is only a couple of miles from the Upper West Side. But as I pushed through the revolving door, a half hour late and damp with sweat, I lamented my habitual lateness. Two days before, I had been 20 minutes late for a black-tie wedding. At another wedding, I missed my ushering duties, then screeched up to a Charleston church as the bride was marching up the aisle, and scooted through a side door to take my place at the altar, a move that wedding planners see often, I&amp;#039;ve been told. I&amp;#039;ve also been told they despise it. My excuse? I can&amp;#039;t even remember, because it was so lame. And yet I&amp;#039;m in fine company. President Obama and Bill Clinton, both multitaskers, are famously late. Naomi Campbell and Axl Rose too, perhaps together. Last spring I caught the heartthrob du jour, Robert Pattinson, on CNN lamenting his propensity to be late to &amp;quot;absolutely everything&amp;quot; because he &amp;quot;messes around for an extra 20 minutes&amp;quot; instead of leaving for appointments. Liz Taylor kept a crowd waiting so long at Cannes in 1987 that they were booing when she arrived. At least she had a sense of humor about it. At her instruction, her funeral started 15 minutes behind schedule. Still, lateness is acceptable in many professions and some entire countries. The theater always starts 10 minutes late. Much of Latin America and the Middle East runs late, just as Hawaii has its &amp;quot;Island Time.&amp;quot; Bollywood celebrities invariably blame their late arrivals on Mumbai traffic. Musicians, especially rappers, live on their own islands of tardiness too, and fashion people push the notion of fashionably late to its outer limits, with runway shows often starting half an hour late in New York and 45 minutes late in Paris. &amp;quot;During fashion season I reset my inner clock to accommodate,&amp;quot; says my friend Bruce Pask, a punctual fashion editor at T: The New York Times Style Magazine. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s crazy.&amp;quot; And also epidemic. With everyone running on a personal schedule, how can you even tell what lateness is anymore? It&amp;#039;s a slippery slope, and also a cuckoo clock. Is 10 minutes late the new on time? Is 20 minutes late the new acceptable? And if it is, then is it okay to calculate fashionable lateness from that point forward? If a cocktail party is called for 6 p.m., polite guests know not to show up until 6:15 or later. (&amp;quot;In the country people are on time, while they&amp;#039;re always a half hour late in the city,&amp;quot; Christine Biddle, a press agent from Westchester County, says.) Hosts, by the way, are required to hold off on serving dinner for only 20 minutes, according to Peggy Post of the Emily Post Institute, just as good guests know to check if a dinner invitation includes a cocktail hour, and then arrive accordingly. Being late to a restaurant is particularly tough on the person waiting in the cruel spotlight of a good table. I once watched a well-known socialite sit alone for half an hour at a high-end Upper East Side caf\u00E9. I felt so bad for her that both our lunches were ruined. It&amp;#039;s equally lamentable to keep an entire party waiting at a hard-to-book restaurant that won&amp;#039;t seat anyone until everyone has arrived. I often wonder if there&amp;#039;s a larger cultural reason for this. Is lateness the habit of a more entitled population? Could we blame technology, as we do for everything else? It&amp;#039;s certainly easier to be late now that you can text that you&amp;#039;re on the way. I&amp;#039;ll never forget keeping Fran Lebowitz waiting for lunch at Michael&amp;#039;s, the media-elite eatery in Midtown. It was years ago, before the days of cell phones and BlackBerrys, and I was scheduled to interview her at high noon. By the time I arrived, at 12:25, her eyes had narrowed to slits and her reception was frosty. But at least she was there and hadn&amp;#039;t left according to what many think of as the 20-minute rule. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m very sorry,&amp;quot; I blurted when I finally arrived. And she said, &amp;quot;You&amp;#039;re very late.&amp;quot; I went on (&amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m mortified. Traffic was terrible...&amp;quot;) but she did nothing more than nod. It stopped me dead. Since then, I&amp;#039;ve learned not to make a big scene of contrition when late. One quick, sincere apology is the way to handle it. Lying is acceptable too, especially if your lateness is caused by nothing other than poor time management and inconsideration. As always, just be careful not to get caught. Elizabeth Callender, an affable Los Angeles lawyer, was recently late to lunch. But since it was for a friend who was always late, she didn&amp;#039;t think much of it, especially when she noticed that her friend was in the car in front of hers on Mulholland Drive. Her friend called her, assuming she was already at the table, and told her she was just pulling up. &amp;quot;I laughed. &amp;#039;No, you&amp;#039;re on Mulholland and I&amp;#039;m right behind you, liar,&amp;#039; &amp;quot; Callender says. Some particularly punctual power people are pushing back against all this. New York Giants coach Tom Coughlin keeps players out of games if they&amp;#039;re late for team meetings, and late to him means anything after five minutes early. The famously punctual Anna Wintour, editor of Vogue, gave Marc Jacobs a social spanking by walking out right in the middle of one of his notoriously late-starting shows several years ago, causing shock waves in the fashion world. Since then Jacobs has been starting close to on time. But even George W. Bush, famous for barking at tardy aides, was kept waiting at his diplomatic debut in 2001 by world leaders from Brazil and Bolivia. And in 2002 he waited half an hour to receive Chinese president Jiang Zemin at his home in Texas. &amp;quot;We could be fishing,&amp;quot; he remarked. Unlike some judges, who throw tardy defendants into jail and fine late witnesses, his hands were tied. Are there solutions for the rest of us? Julie Morgenstern, author of Time Management from the Inside Out, suggests learning to say no to the people and phone calls that sidetrack you. Gretchen Rubin, author of The Happiness Project, suggests getting up an hour earlier than usual to get organized (ha!). Pauline Wallin, a psychologist and author of Taming Your Inner Brat, thinks the trick is to stop blaming circumstances and put the blame where it belongs. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s easier to think of reasons outside yourself,&amp;quot; she writes. The truth, I think, is that we chronically late people are as lazy as we are mentally challenged. It requires discipline to know the difference between Greenwich Mean Time and Me Time, but it also requires friends who won&amp;#039;t put up with it anymore. One man-about-town I know figured out a non-inflammatory way of informing a friend that her lateness had become intolerable. &amp;quot;I just told her I didn&amp;#039;t mind waiting, but I was worried about what others might think,&amp;#039; he told me. Did it make her more punctual? Of course not. Maybe he should have told her about a French proverb that says, &amp;quot;People count the faults of those who keep them waiting.&amp;quot; That&amp;#039;s almost enough to get me out of the house a good 10 minutes earlier. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.townandcountrymag.com/society/a883/fashionably-late/>