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The most memorable moments in reality television's long and storied history have all started with a seemingly innocuous item. Keeping up with the Kardashians had a Bentley. Real Housewives of New Jersey had a memoir. High Society had an unnamed, historical fiction book tucked away in the stacks of a branch of the New York Public Library—and one mother’s relentless quest for the truth.

I’m speaking, of course, about the short-lived, eight-episode CW reality show High Society, the network’s attempt to mimic the runaway success of its melodramatic tentpole series: Gossip Girl. High Society was melodramatic alright, but it lacked its fictional counterpart’s enviable glitz and polished sparkle. Instead, High Society focused on the hollow husks that made up New York’s socialite scene in 2010, stars burning their brightest just before the social media boom shifted the dynamics, making it possible for anyone with an Instagram account to become a bonafide socialite. Across eight glorious episodes, cameras followed New York It Girl Tinsley Mortimer and a tangential group of miscreant rich kids—acquaintances to Ms. Mortimer at best—who were enjoying the spoils of money and knownness in the last days of Gawker, living ostentatiously before their stars burned out forever.

High Society is a wild ride. With commercials cut out, each episode runs only twenty minutes, each one made slightly more egregious and atrocious than the last by the trainwrecks that make up its cast. There’s Tinsley, the Park Avenue Princess; Paul, a bowtie-clad, blazer-and-chinos-wearing, “Page Six scandalboy”; Jules, a woman who is simply evil beyond comprehension (racist, homophobic, xenophobic, etc.); Dabney, Tinsley’s unfortunately-named sister; Devorah, the “editor” of Social Life “magazine,” a monthly publication that cobbles soundbites from different interviews with people like Nicole Kidman and Angelina Jolie and passes them off as its own; and Alex, a non-event so noneventful that she disappears after a few episodes—which, considering the nature of the show, is probably a blessing.

But there’s one woman who manages to come out on top, completely unscathed. She’s a reality television power player so deft at the game, so naturally funny, and so skilled in the theatre of self that her presence takes every scene to heights even the greatest playwrights could never fathom. I’m talking about one Dale Mercer.

Dale is mother to Tinsley and Dabney, but she’s so much more than a mother, she’s a star. Tennessee Williams spent his entire career trying to hone in on a matriarchal character as layered and fascinating as Dale, but died when he realized he could never come close. Dale Mercer stands at what looks to be a be a modest 5’1, but her presence is that of someone far more grand: a petite southern gentlewoman, all spiked sweet tea and “Bless Your Heart” barbs, until you get on her bad side. Dale spends her time on High Society advocating for the rekindling of Tinsley’s failed marriage, desperate to do everything she can so that her daughter doesn’t ruin her It Girl reputation and end up stuck in Midtown (which Dale calls “The Midtown”) forever, divorced and defamed.

In one episode, she gathers Tinsley and her friends for a girls dinner, where everyone will suggest men to set her up with, and then holds up a large picture of Tinsley and her ex-husband Topper at their wedding. When met with silence, she earnestly asks, “Where’s the laughter, the clapping?!” In another, she calls Tinsley to Newport, Rhode Island just to jab her about her divorce in front of a picturesque sunset. Adorned in a black fur coat and large Chanel sunglasses, Dale delivers a last ditch plea to her daughter: “I was trying to save you, Tinsley!” For Dale, drama isn’t so much of a television spectacle as it is a lifestyle. In fact, if you told me that Dale Mercer didn’t realize there were cameras filming her for a few weeks until she got the request to come in and do confessional interviews, I wouldn’t think twice.

But the great culmination of Dale’s journey traversing through the dregs of Manhattan’s “High” Society comes early, in only the second episode. Positively verklempt by her daughter rebounding with a German prince named Casimir, Dale sets off to do what any good mother would do when faced with an impossible situation: she takes to the historical records.

“My daughter Tinsley is dating a German prince,” she begins in a confessional. “It is tragic, it is tragic! I know that the German people are lovely people, but, let’s face it: their history-.” She pauses. “I-it’s…not good.” So Dale shuffles through Manhattan in a little grey pencil dress, swinging her Hermes Kelly bag in the direction of the New York Society Library. When she clops in on her Louboutins, camera crew in tow, the desk receptionist, in a brief but unforgettable appearance, gives a look of shock and surprise unlike anything television has ever seen before.

Whether the person at the desk was so surprised because they knew Dale from the Society pages or because Dale is actually the ghost of a southern oil baroness from the late 1800s that the receptionist once saw in a book they archived is something we will never know. But luckily they’re able to point Dale toward the Suspicious German Royalty & Potential War Crimes section, and she’s on her way to make some history of her own.

What happens next is almost too good to be true. Sometimes, when I think back on it, I question its veracity and have to return to the text—as Dale did that very day—to see if my memory is embellishing details. And no. It’s all there, beat by beat how I remember it.

Beneath the harsh fluorescent lights of an underfunded New York Public library building, Dale gingerly puts one foot in front of the other as she wanders down a long corridor filled with historical tomes, playfully looking from the left to the right. Cameras capture her through a stack of books from the other side of the shelf, as if this were Clue or Mary-Kate & Ashley: The Mystery of Thorn Mansion. “I just think that if she’s considering marrying Casamir—and I certainly hope she’s not—someone needs to know the facts,” Dale says. “And that would be, the mommy.”

Stopping in her tracks to pick out a random book on a shelf, blurred by the editors, a low gasp falls from Dale. “This is what I was afraid of,” she says quietly. Cue dramatic sound effects. “Oh my goodness, Oh my goodness.” Her words sting with an icy chill, until cameras pull back and reveal she has simply just flipped past the blank first page. “I found this book, and I thought, ‘Uh-oh!”

Dale, stone-faced and pale, continues to page through the book, casually dropping instantly-iconic word bombs like, “Goodness gracious, what a history.” Hans Zimmer is kept awake at night kicking himself over not getting the call to compose the cinema-grade orchestral piece that’s coming to a swell as Dale inches toward the truth. “Tinsley’s wonderful heritage, you know, colliding with this background, it’s frightening to me! I mean, it’s almost apocalyptic!”

Crescendo forte. Climax. Beat. Silence.

“I’m checking the book out.”

One of the greatest lines in the history of cinema. Gone with the Wind, you’re over. Wizard of Oz, you’re a flop. Dale Mercer outsold. Not only that, but she outread, outacted, and outperformed every other person with a formal SAG card. If High Society hadn’t been all but scrubbed from cultural memory, young gay men would travel all the way from their rural Nebraska towns to use this scene for their audition monologue for NYU Tisch. And they’d be instantly turned away, because this is a moment too rich and too lived-in to be replicated by some callow homosexual with a misguided dream. You’ve got to spend at least 20 years as a long-suffering, gin-soaked southern housewife to even come close to the stupefied tenor of Dale Mercer watching her daughter risk throwing it all away for a German prince, sending them both back to a white-shuttered porch in Virginia.

Was it all for television? Was there any horrific World War II history darkening Prince Casimir’s ancestral past? Was Tinsley really threatening to ruin everything she had worked so hard for? (And by “worked,” I, of course, mean “had handed to her by the pages of W and The New York Post.”) We really have no way of knowing. One of my great missions in life is to work my way into the CW archives—either through bribery or sexual favors, if need be—to gain access to the High Society dailies and uncover the uncensored version of The Book.

But until then, I’m left with only the comfort of knowing that actresses aren’t made, they’re born. Dale Mercer has no formal training, life was her acting coach. Anyone can put in the hours with the greatest instructors alive, but nothing can prepare you for the bright production lights of the CW like a life lived hard: all money, no happiness. That is, until Dale found her way back to New York on the coattails of her socialite daughter. Faced with the threat of it all crumbling before her, Dale sauntered through that library with the conviction of any great artiste in their element. Like Gena Rowlands in Opening Night, haunted by apparitions of a youth slipped away, Dale silently toiled with the traumas laid bare before her and brought it all to the stage of the New York Society Library. With dazzling success, a star was born.

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