During my research for my book-in-progress, Primates of Park Avenue: an Anthropological Memoir of Uptown Motherhood, I discovered a startling practice among the privileged parents of Manhattan I am interviewing and observing for my ethnographic look at raising children in one of the wealthiest areas of the country, the Upper East Side.

When I heard the term, "black market, handicapped Disney guide," I stopped in my tracks.

What did you just say? I asked my source, who repeated it. After that I learned from many other parents in Manhattan about how the privileged few in New York City "do Disney."

When I learned that people were hiring people with disability passes for the day to pretend to be a member of their family so they and their children could cut the long lines at Disney and move to the front, my jaw dropped. I knew that this was just a window onto a world of practices that are surprising, specific, and sometimes upsetting.

The term "black market, handicapped Disney guide," is not mine. I know that the acceptable description is people with disabilities, and I want to be respectful of people who have a disability and have to cope with a world that is not always accepting and accommodating of differences. But the meme has caught on — in large part because so few people knew about this secret practices that is just one example among many of how the Uptown Manhattan tribe operates via exchanges of privileged information.

The New York Post wrote about it and loads of other media picked it up. CNN interviewed me, too. Even Saturday Night Live sent up the practice May 18th on "Weekend Update."

Overwhelmingly, people who commented on the story — and there were tens of thousands — were as shocked as I was.

Meanwhile, I will continue to write about my research results, revealing how the Uptown tribe lives day to day.

Did you know that — if you can afford it — you can hire a play date consultant to make sure your children are playing appropriately with other children? Or that it's common practice here to hire personal shoppers, not to help get ready for a big event, but to curate a wardrobe of outfits for school drop off and pick up?

In affluent Manhattan, a place of intense competition and intense anxiety, it sometimes seems there is a consultant for every aspect of parenting, feeding off maternal ambitions and maternal fears, and fueling the seemingly endless quest to be a perfect mother.

Primate social behaviors in these hierarchical contexts run the gamut from cooperative to conflictual to baffling. I look forward to sharing more research and hearing from you about unbelievable parenting practices in your area.