My partner and I went last Saturday night to see Florence Henderson in her Joe’s Pub appearance downtown. I had not been downtown in a bit, and it felt kinda like visiting another city. Well, it is another city. And it’s a happening place.
Loved it. And loved seeing Henderson, who really is America’s Mom. She led us all in a group rendition of the “Brady Bunch” theme song. She called it “our National Anthem,” and she has a frighteningly good point. The only difference: we all seemed to know every word and every note of the theme song.
Before the act started, Henderson was the star of a brief film clip review. She’s had quite a career, but she goes out of her way here to stress the theater and New York-ish aspects of things. She insists she stumbled into the Brady realm. “You cannot kill it with a stick,” she says of the sitcom. “Believe me, I have tried.”
Actually, she seems good-natured about being identified as America’s Mom and you can feel the love that the audience has for her presence. She plays against type with a vengeance, though, throwing in jokes about Viagra and Tiger Woods. Mostly, though, she likes to reminisce about her days doing Broadway musicals, which clearly remain close to her heart. She lost out on the movie version of “Oklahoma,” she recounts, adding with considerable comic energy, “That little bitch Shirley Jones got it.”
Henderson’s voice is not always up to every challenge, but her show has an oddly deep emotional power. She talks movingly of being embarrassed as a teenager of her family’s poverty. She was the tenth child in her family and has a few candid things to say about how she was unsure of her mom’s love for her. Not what you expect from America’s Mom, but that makes it all the more powerful. And she delivers a killer, from-the-heart rendition of “My Old Kentucky Home.”
If FloHen comes back to the Village or anywhere near you, go. America's Mom has more heart than we even knew. How reassuring.
Friday, February 19, 2010
Thursday, February 11, 2010
Michelle Obama's Ill-Timed Food Fight
As if the president’s poll numbers were not low enough, his wife has decided to go around the country telling people that their children are too fat.
Somebody should stop her.
At least that’s what I was thinking this morning, as I watched First Lady Michelle Obama tell “Good Morning America” about her own affection for fast food. “I love burgers and fries,” Mrs. Obama felt compelled to say to Robin Roberts. Yeah, sure, but not as much as the average American.
I looked at my TV and said aloud: “Is she really going to talk about this?”Unspoken was the part where I find myself amazed that she would choose to launch her initiative at exactly this moment, the wrong moment, right in the middle of the Great Recession and her husband’s first most serious political crisis. Not to mention the two wars underway.
Timing is everything in politics. And this timing stinks.
It’s weird cause I agree with the First Lady. Childhood obesity really is an epidemic. And it’s true too that Americans seem these days to be scared of exactly the wrong things, expressing almost unending anxiety about a terrorist attack without realizing that French fries are an even more pressing enemy. A lot more of us are going to die from our diets than any outside threat, no matter how manic the media attention on Al Qaeda makes us.
And still. I cannot help but think that with the Tea Party people in full fury, and even President Obama’s supporters wondering if he overreached in his first year, this is an ill-timed venture. In New York City, we have seen the resentment that can come when the government tells its people what to eat. On our bad days, we accuse Mayor Michael Bloomberg of instituting a Nanny State. Surely the White House does not need the label right now, as it pursues what conservative critics call a government takeover of health care.
With Mrs. Obama, it’s even worse, because the food fight she’s starting also looks a little like the dumbing-down of the First Lady. Mrs. Obama is the second straight First Lady to pretend that she is less intelligent than she actually is. Weird, but not really surprising in a country that took approximately 16 years to warm up to a strong woman named Hillary Rodham Clinton. So rather than use her still-impressive standing with the American people to address the issues of the day, Mrs. Obama is going off on a poll-tested tangent. Such is the life of a First Lady.
Maybe I’m being too critical—which, in turn, could have something to do with losing my job six months ago. Yeah, that’s it. My perspective is off. The problem is that I am hardly alone with this perception problem, and Mrs. Obama will be chatting about children’s diets on my psychological turf. Even with the unemployment rate officially slipping below 10 percent according to last week’s news, a lot of us out here are suffering. We’re either unemployed or under-employed or over-employed, needing to come up with five or six jobs to replace the one that we lost. We’re stressed, we’re fat and we do not need a beautiful thin woman talking to us right this minute about portion control and eating our greens. The East Wing of the White House has seriously misread the mood of the nation, something the West Wing has been doing for about a year now.
So here’s my memo to the First Lady: Let’s not have that chat about childhood obesity right now. Wait until more of us have jobs. Cancel the rest of the media tour. Instead, let’s make a deal. I’ll try to eat less white food and more vegetables and get to the gym three or four times a week—aerobic activity each time. I’ll do yoga on Wednesday nights. And you go back to talking about supporting our troops and working in the White House garden.
If you have any extra time after that, please use it to pass at least a little health care. My COBRA’s going to run out soon.
Somebody should stop her.
At least that’s what I was thinking this morning, as I watched First Lady Michelle Obama tell “Good Morning America” about her own affection for fast food. “I love burgers and fries,” Mrs. Obama felt compelled to say to Robin Roberts. Yeah, sure, but not as much as the average American.
I looked at my TV and said aloud: “Is she really going to talk about this?”Unspoken was the part where I find myself amazed that she would choose to launch her initiative at exactly this moment, the wrong moment, right in the middle of the Great Recession and her husband’s first most serious political crisis. Not to mention the two wars underway.
Timing is everything in politics. And this timing stinks.
It’s weird cause I agree with the First Lady. Childhood obesity really is an epidemic. And it’s true too that Americans seem these days to be scared of exactly the wrong things, expressing almost unending anxiety about a terrorist attack without realizing that French fries are an even more pressing enemy. A lot more of us are going to die from our diets than any outside threat, no matter how manic the media attention on Al Qaeda makes us.
And still. I cannot help but think that with the Tea Party people in full fury, and even President Obama’s supporters wondering if he overreached in his first year, this is an ill-timed venture. In New York City, we have seen the resentment that can come when the government tells its people what to eat. On our bad days, we accuse Mayor Michael Bloomberg of instituting a Nanny State. Surely the White House does not need the label right now, as it pursues what conservative critics call a government takeover of health care.
With Mrs. Obama, it’s even worse, because the food fight she’s starting also looks a little like the dumbing-down of the First Lady. Mrs. Obama is the second straight First Lady to pretend that she is less intelligent than she actually is. Weird, but not really surprising in a country that took approximately 16 years to warm up to a strong woman named Hillary Rodham Clinton. So rather than use her still-impressive standing with the American people to address the issues of the day, Mrs. Obama is going off on a poll-tested tangent. Such is the life of a First Lady.
Maybe I’m being too critical—which, in turn, could have something to do with losing my job six months ago. Yeah, that’s it. My perspective is off. The problem is that I am hardly alone with this perception problem, and Mrs. Obama will be chatting about children’s diets on my psychological turf. Even with the unemployment rate officially slipping below 10 percent according to last week’s news, a lot of us out here are suffering. We’re either unemployed or under-employed or over-employed, needing to come up with five or six jobs to replace the one that we lost. We’re stressed, we’re fat and we do not need a beautiful thin woman talking to us right this minute about portion control and eating our greens. The East Wing of the White House has seriously misread the mood of the nation, something the West Wing has been doing for about a year now.
So here’s my memo to the First Lady: Let’s not have that chat about childhood obesity right now. Wait until more of us have jobs. Cancel the rest of the media tour. Instead, let’s make a deal. I’ll try to eat less white food and more vegetables and get to the gym three or four times a week—aerobic activity each time. I’ll do yoga on Wednesday nights. And you go back to talking about supporting our troops and working in the White House garden.
If you have any extra time after that, please use it to pass at least a little health care. My COBRA’s going to run out soon.
Monday, February 8, 2010
That Really Was Super
Nothing bored me like football. And I felt some sense of satisfaction this season, when the Wall Street Journal went and analyzed the number of action that actually occurs in a game. I cannot remember the number, but it was less than 20 minutes of playing football on the field. It’s mostly time-outs and the clock running out and blah blah blah.
That said, last night was really something special. My partner and I had the TV on, but I didn’t really move into game mode until the late third quarter. I missed that big post-intermission play (oh, I mean halftime) that got things going, but I saw enough to be very excited. Not because of football, but because of New Orleans. A city that is singular, a place like no other, and one that has been too largely forgotten.
Even today, on the morning after, it is a bit disturbing to hear people who have not visited or even read the city talk about how it is completely back from its Katrina days. That’s not true. New Orleans is a city that still very much suffers and deserves the attention of Americans of all stripes. Our president, like our last president, has paid too little attention. As have the rest of us. But the big game and the even bigger victory by the Saints is a reminder of the spirit of a great people. They know how to have a good time. And after all they have suffered, they certainly deserve one.
That said, last night was really something special. My partner and I had the TV on, but I didn’t really move into game mode until the late third quarter. I missed that big post-intermission play (oh, I mean halftime) that got things going, but I saw enough to be very excited. Not because of football, but because of New Orleans. A city that is singular, a place like no other, and one that has been too largely forgotten.
Even today, on the morning after, it is a bit disturbing to hear people who have not visited or even read the city talk about how it is completely back from its Katrina days. That’s not true. New Orleans is a city that still very much suffers and deserves the attention of Americans of all stripes. Our president, like our last president, has paid too little attention. As have the rest of us. But the big game and the even bigger victory by the Saints is a reminder of the spirit of a great people. They know how to have a good time. And after all they have suffered, they certainly deserve one.
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