Alice Kahn

Alice Joyce Kahn (born 1943[1]) is an American nurse practitioner and humorist who popularized the slang word "yuppie", describing young urban professionals,[2] and also the term "Gourmet Ghetto", naming an influential retail neighborhood of Berkeley, California.

Her outgoing, debonair father was Herman Nelson, and her mother was the former Idelle Avonovitch, a comparatively sheltered young woman from a shtetl in the Suwałki Region of Poland.

[4] In 1973 she enrolled at California State University, Hayward, to become a registered nurse, working with the Alameda County Public Health Department.

By 1980 the nickname was widely established: writer and editor Sandra Rosenzweig wrote about Northern California restaurants for Clay Felker's New West magazine based in Los Angeles, saying that Rosenthal's deli was "Located in the heart of Berkeley's gourmet ghetto – next door to Cocolat and half a block from Chez Panisse".

[13] In early 1983, Kahn began writing an article about young urban professionals named Dirk and Brie, a satirical faux-sociological study.

[2] She published her satirical piece in the East Bay Express on June 10, 1983, about ten weeks after Bob Greene put the word in his Chicago Tribune column on March 23.

[4][2] After accepting the offer of a free ticket to see the Grateful Dead at the Greek Theatre in Berkeley, Kahn reviewed their July 1984 concert, writing in the East Bay Express how she pictured Jerry Garcia as the "hippie abominable snowman".

[5] Kahn arrived to find Garcia very high on some substance (a condition she easily recognized from her nurse training) and she thought he would be a terrible interview subject.

Kahn received $1200 from West but she gave almost all of it to Dennis McNally, the publicist of the Grateful Dead, because she had accidentally damaged his car with her own as she left Garcia's house.