Weird is a word that’s been getting a lot of mileage lately, but try this on for size: A Raleigh-based secret society comprising 21-to-35-year-old white men has unknown agents scouring the state of North Carolina every year to find young women from wealthy families. These women are then culled—using vague, largely legacy-based, criteria—into a selective invite list for an expensive ritual that involves a series of parties, a personalized stool, and a final induction ceremony.
The chosen young women, all of whom are 19 years old and white (with one known exception—the first Black woman to participate was in 2017, almost a century after the event’s founding), don wedding dresses and often white gloves, symbolizing their purity and refinement, for the grand event: a moment where they are presented onstage to an assembled crowd, each woman accompanied by her father, who is given a military title for the occasion.
This is the strange ritual of “coming out” at the North Carolina Debutante Ball, an annual event held in Raleigh since 1923—and the only remaining statewide debutante ball in the United States. Out now, Recovering Debs, a new limited-episode podcast explores the experiences of women who have participated in NC debutante culture.
Podcast host Mary Lambeth Moore, who lives in Raleigh and is the author of the novel Sleeping with Patty Hearst, is a debutante herself. She hadn’t thought much about her own 1977 debut at the statewide ball, she says, until she began working on a memoir. The writing process led Moore to revisit her experience, which left lingering questions, both about her participation and debutante culture itself.
“Why does this event, which is rooted in sexism, racism, and classism, still exist?” Moore says of her questions behind the podcast, which made its own debut this summer. “How do the young women who are debutantes feel about it today—and who is really benefiting from this? The podcast began with my curiosity about these questions, and I feel like I’m beginning to get some answers.”
Recovering Debs begins with the story of Lisa Grabarek, another debutante and the daughter of Wense Grabarek, who served as Durham’s mayor from 1963 to 1971.
Beloved as a public figure who helped the city voluntarily desegregate during the civil rights movement, Wense Grabarek spent much of his long life (he lived to be 100) bringing together the city’s Black and white leaders, businesses, and communities.
Listening to his daughter’s debut story, it is hard to reconcile her father’s public work for equality with his desperate desire for her to participate in an event she objected to because of its exclusionary nature; it is even harder to stomach the tactics by which her parents coerce her into participating. Without spoiling the episode, Lisa Grabarek’s debut becomes a matter of life and death—or, at least, one manipulated to seem as if it is. Lisa ’s story leaves listeners wondering: What kind of power do these debutante balls hold that they can sway even a man of Wense Grabarek’s moral certitude?
Many cultures around the world celebrate a young woman’s coming-of-age with community celebrations, from quinceañeras and bat mitzvahs to sweet 16s and Filipino debuts. Black cotillion culture includes debutante balls as well, several of which are held in North Carolina.
And there are plenty of debutante balls outside of Raleigh’s statewide ball—many cities have their own smaller debutante balls, such as the one in Durham that Lisa Grabarek describes. But these events all differ from North Carolina’s statewide ball in many ways—and the specificity of this event is what Moore investigates in the rest of what she plans to be an eight-part series.
“I understand that some women love making their debut, and they have a great time,” Moore says. “But one thing I’ve learned is that when we’re talking about the statewide ball, many people, especially the debutantes themselves, don’t know a lot of what is behind it.”
The debutante ball’s colonialist origins hearken back to England when wealthy families married off their daughters by presenting them to society. The NC state ball, whether or not it has integrated itself (and evidence suggests it barely has), remains tied to this legacy of colonialism and white supremacy in numerous ways. Moore points out, for instance, that there’s always been a higher number of debutantes from eastern North Carolina—the part of the state where the largest population of enslavers were, too.
The driving power behind this statewide ball is a group called the Terpsichorean Club, “comprised of young gentlemen from the Raleigh area,” according to wording repeated in several articles about the ball from the conservative outlet North State Journal. Unlike other debutante balls, which usually benefit a charity or have some alignment with a nonprofit, the Terpsichorean Club appears to function only as a private social club. (The organization did not reply when the INDY reached out for comment.)
For a ritual limited to the very few—there are fewer than 200 debs presented each year at North Carolina’s statewide ball—debutante balls have an outsize presence in pop culture, from Bridgerton to, more locally, the North Carolina–based Amazon show The Summer I Turned Pretty. Deb balls make good backdrops for narrative drama, which seems true in both fiction and life. They are also, unabashedly, about making a display of wealth and securing connections among the elite.
“I know this is far from the biggest issue that our state is facing today, but I think it’s a marker that points to larger issues,” Moore says. “It may be a small way, but this is one way that social and perhaps political power gets perpetuated in our state. In a state that ranks low in economic mobility, this seems to be one link in a chain of the good old boy network.”
Moore’s conversations are cultural critiques, especially in an episode featuring Anna Shelton-Ormond, a former debutante and fifth-year PhD student in sociology who wrote her undergraduate honors thesis on debutante culture. But with or without a guest who wrote a thesis entitled “Hegemonic Processes of Debutantes as Southern Social Royalty,” as Shelton-Ormond did, the podcast deftly peels back the layers of meaning around an event that, wonky as it seems from the outside, retains power both in the state and in the cultural imagination.
Recovering Debs’ cheeky title invokes therapy-speak, the idea of “recovery” as a process by which one works through an addiction or traumatic event. It sets the tone for Moore’s interviews, which are warm and intimate, like friends talking over tea. Recorded in Moore’s home, Recovering Debs is also a family affair: Moore’s husband, Bill Gowan, acts as an editor, as does her sister, Carolyn Moore, and Moore’s son, Max, wrote the theme music.
Debuting is mostly a legacy venture—something families do together for generations—so it’s fun that Moore’s family is part of her “recovery,” too. Recovering, in a traditional sense, is returning to health after an illness and getting better. This is what the antiracist movement asks of white people, too: to investigate their role in white supremacy and the ways they have benefited from it and to do better. Recovering Debs offers an opportunity to follow along as some of the folks who most benefit from an exclusionary culture unpack the meaning of their participation.
“I do think this is a time when many white women are waking up to white supremacy in its many forms,” Moore says. “In the South, there’s a long history of white women being especially idealized and protected—when the debutante ball started, that was very much a part of the culture. It’s built into the whole deb thing.”
“I do think this is a time when many white women are waking up to white supremacy in its many forms. In the South, there’s a long history of white women being especially idealized and protected—when the debutante ball started, that was very much a part of the culture.”
When I ask Moore how long, on average, today’s state debutantes spend preparing for their debut and what the total cost might be, she tallies up various expenses: the cost to attend the ball is $4,600, though that’s just the start—then come dresses, travel, hotel rooms.
As she did the math, it struck me that the answer also isn’t quantifiable. Moore’s interviewees all paid other kinds of costs, too. Most trained their entire lives to become debutantes, born into it, like a family business.
As I was listening to the third episode, my 14-year-old daughter barged into my office, interrupting me as kids do. She asked what I was doing and, off the cuff, I said, “I’m listening to a podcast about mothers making their daughters do things they don’t want to do.”
“It should be about mothers letting their daughters do more things they want to do,” she replied, with the quick wit and urgency of a girl who has been creating a PowerPoint on why she should be allowed to get Snapchat.
The difference between what we want for our daughters and what they want can be a chasm—this is true whether or not you’re a debutante. I’ve never been economically or culturally near debut culture, so participation was never asked of me, but I do remember feeling my parents’ heavy disappointment when I refused to attend church youth group.
Back then, I felt their longing for me to be more compliant. Now that I’m on the flip side of it, I understand that longing better. I’ve wanted my kids to like museums more. I’ve pressured them to play piano or to go to dinner with people they’d rather not. I’ve asked them to grin and bear something, no doubt, that I shouldn’t. Parents make mistakes. Sometimes they realize it and recover; sometimes they don’t and their children must forge ahead with recovery on their own.
As November looms on the horizon, with abortion rights on the ballot accompanied by a surge of conservative orthodoxy about women’s roles, it’s clear that the past is not quite so past. The complexity with which Moore and her guests consider the stakes of their participation in what may seem to be a frivolous event is a reminder that traditions have teeth. That the personal is also, always, political. That the strength behind the state deb ball goes beyond whatever small group of men is running it to include far-reaching systems of power and ideology.
Because getting your daughter to debut by offering her a trip anywhere in the world (as one deb recounts on the podcast) isn’t just a funny bribe; it’s teaching her that free will has a price tag and participation can be bought. It’s telling her that upholding the status quo is more important than her feelings or morals. It’s rebuilding a racist, classist system of exclusion upheld by nimble bodies in white dresses, who might not have to “Texas Dip” but still have to contort themselves into positions they don’t want to hold.
In episode 2 of Recovering Debs, Lisa Grabarek describes the discomfort she felt every time she saw the two framed photos from her debutante ball that hung in her parents’ home.
She tells her father, later in life, how and why these images disturb her, detailing the pain and shame she’s held on to in the years since. She thinks he will surely remove the photos, now that he knows. He doesn’t. After her parents die, she takes the frames down, stomps the glass, and tears the photos to pieces. It’s an act of recovery.
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