Born Katherine Ursula Towle, “lace-curtain Irish” in Dorchester, Mass., and educated at Radcliffe, she longed to be a reporter, and married one, Lindesay Parrott, who later worked for The New York Times.

The flavors may suggest a lace-curtain bistro in Lyon, but the ethereal lightness of the potatoes says Mena, and only Mena.

When Mike climbs the social ladder out of Southie, his old friends mock him as “lace-curtain Irish.”

It’s THE club to belong to if you live in the lace-curtain sections of the Valley.

The New Negroes were hardly alone among aspirational Americans in the pathos and dignity of their respectability; one sees the same attempt to outwit the oppressor by becoming like the oppressor among the lace-curtain Irish or the stained-glass Jews.