by Wesley
Home >> It's a good thing!
I was first introduced (not formally) to Martha Stewart when I was about 13 or 14 years old. Her show was on Friday mornings at 11:00. I, obviously, had to go to school so I recorded her show, Martha Stewart Living, to watch later. Soon after this discovery, I started subscribing to her magazine. Do not ask about a teenage boy who subscribes to Martha Stewart Living.
Martha cooks, Martha decorates, Martha sews, Martha gardens, Martha has chow chows, Martha renovates houses, Martha carves pumpkins with a jigsaw, Martha goes to tag sales (not to be confused with rummage sales or garage sales; these are not to be found in Fairfield County). But curiously enough, Martha never cleans. I think this is why America wants to be Martha Stewart. If you are Martha Stewart, you can dust your entire kitchen with flour while making your mother’s stollen recipe, you can whip blobs of scalding caramel syrup on a pyramid of fried dough balls (probably called beignets because anything French sounds better than fried dough balls), you can pot plants right there in the dining room. You can do all of this because when you are finished with your little chore, you have a team of sixteen to clean up after you. You suddenly appear à la Preysler before your unexpected guests in a perfectly shiny and anti-bacterial home.
Martha Stewart turned housekeeping into pure glamour. She doesn’t give you tips on how to get stains out of your children’s clothes; the servants do that. She doesn’t tell you to use vinegar and newspaper to clean your windows; let the window cleaner get his hands dirty. All you have to do is the fun, creative, and laudable stuff. Nobody notices how clean your windows are but everyone will rave over your fabulous blood orange martinis and your ambrosial passion fruit vodka smoothies.
Real people, call them hoi polloi if you like, do not like this. Real people know that you have to clean up when you make puff pastry. Real people do not make puff pastry. Real people know that gardening is not just prancing around picking your red-ripe tomatoes. Real people know that chow chows need to be brushed.
And some of us aspire to be something beyond real people, people who would justify insider trading, people who would buy colonial farms in Connecticut just for the hell of it, people who would dare to make (serve and drink) cocktails at 11 a.m.
I no longer subscribe to Martha Stewart Living but every time I go to the U.S., I pick up a copy. I love Martha and someday I will be just like her!
Released under the following licence: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDeriv
You are free to copy, distribute and display the contents of this article but you must give credit to and mention the original author. You are not allowed to use these contents for commercial purposes, and you may not modify them to make any derivative works.
For full licence description, go to: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.1/es/deed.en
Posted on http://www.weeklyletter.com at 2006-11-02 11:00:00 +0100
Copyright (C) ITT (http://www.itt.es) and Planet Lingua (http://www.lingua.es)
We have more weekly letters by Wesley
Poll for this weekly letter
Who cleans up after you?
Licencing
You are free to copy, distribute and display the contents of this article but you must give credit to and mention the original author. You are not allowed to use these contents for commercial purposes, and you may not modify them to make any derivative works.
(click the above link for more information)
Add a comment
Aside from being a very popular celebrity in the U.S., Martha Stewart is a convicted criminal. It is a real shame to see how “wholesome” and “loving” T.V. moms and mothers can turn into such greedy, lying criminals. I would also like to think that Martha was a very innocent, fun-loving household wiz…but insider trading is no joke, especially when you are already a millionaire. What was she thinking?
I’ve never seen this program, but in Argentina there are many like this one…
I think that housekeeping has a big component of routine and tedium and it is also a kind of nightmare that begins every morning. I don’t know what kind o crime this person has committed, but to put a bit of glamur to the domestic work certainly it is not a crime!!!
What was she thinking? She was thinking ‘More! More!’. The thinking of someone who has been taught to win at all costs. The thinking of someone who thinks wealth is a value. The thinking of the cancer cell .
But I don’t mind if she has money and I really don’t care how she got it. What worries me about this execrable she-devil is that she is selling some sanitized version of white middle-class suburbia. It must be wretched to watch Martha Stewart if you have three children, a slob of a husband and little money coming in.
This slippery, scheming baggage distorts reality in the same way as drugs. But more insidiously.
If this is the American Dream, I’d hate to see the nightmare.
Wesley, don’t despair: Filling the gap in her own literature, Martha has coincidentally just published a new book about less glam matters of the house. Now readers can learn from the domestic goddess herself about how to iron a shirt, dust lampshades, eradicate pests, repair a leaky faucet, and rid clothes of even the most brow-raising stains. You’re all set.
I thought I recognized my sister there (above)!
Oh no! Wesley will despair if MS now caters to the hoi polloi, just as he would despair if MS were wholesome! No! No! This Weekly is Wesley at his tongue-in-cheek best. It was he who told me to have my butler serve Ferrero Rocher in pyramids.
This isn’t about insider trading or the American dream. Martha didn’t used to be wholesome or cater to the ordinary! I’m not talking about classes of wealth but classes of style. I’m not talking about innocence; neither Martha nor I have any interest in it. We are not June Cleaver and do not aspire to be anything like her.
The American dream involves work and entrepeneurism. That’s not my dream. Hard work? Please. Martha may represent that in her personal and business life but doesn’t, or didn’t, on her show and in her magazine.
The true shame here is that she has, for purely business reasons, lowered her standards to sell her product to middle-class suburbia. There are already thousands of manuals on how to iron or repair a leaky faucet. Why does Martha have to make one? So that people will think she is your average homemaker? Do you really think that she irons her shirts? Do you really think that she fixes her own faucets?
I guess that mediocrity is what sells best in the U.S. How sad.
Hello!
I never understand why this caracters work so well on TV, I guess people really like watching those shows.
I think it’s great if she gives tips for daily home survival, but I wouldn’t take it as if she invented those tips or that she actually carries that live.
Do we have anyone like her in Spain (not in the criminal way)?
I know of Ana Rosa, she had her name put on a show and a magazine…
Bye and have a nice weekend.
Cristina
Well, I’d watch her program in case I could do it. Not because I like watching TV (I don’t), just to see how it is. How glam she is! As well as I would watch our Preysler cooking or picking flowers from her garden.
I think it’s only because they are not real. As the creams which are announced in the magazines that rub out all our wrinkles. I look at them.
If I had to choose between looking at a woman how she cleans, works, runs from a place to another,... and does juggling with the money to finish the month, and your Martha,.... I’d prefer the second one. (I know the first one very well)
Have a very nice week end!
I like homemaking programs, too. Here in Germany, I haven’t seen any equivalent to Martha Stewart yet, but there are programs like Supernanny in which a person (usually a woman) comes to your home and improves it. Either she watches how you bring up your kids, or she gives you tips on how to make your house cleaner with little effort, or – and this is what I’d like – she radically transforms the look of your apartment.
Once, I was walking down the street pulling a trolley, the kind that flight attendants use when they’re at an airport. A little boy approached me and asked if I was Supernanny. He thought he was having a brush with fame!
I am not a Supernanny. I am not a domestic god. But I am a TxikiChef. It’s true! I come out as a TxikiChef in a beautiful cookbook titled TxikiChef. Well, I try to be a TxikiChef in real life, too. Every weekend, I do a recipe at home. And I put on the same apple-green apron that I had to wear when we did the photos for the book. It has the word TxikiChef embroidered on it.
I think in Spain we have another version of Martha. She is called Ana Rosa Quintana and she is the queen of glamour for a lot of people. I don’t understand why, really. I think she is vulgar, nothing else, but middle-aged women love her…
I am a working woman and I don’t want to be like the famous Martha. I don’t have a garden big enough to have several types of roses and I cook everyday for my children, but I don’t know how to prepare a cocktail. I don’t need either, Spanish wines are great!!!!
Hi! I agree with you, in Spain the example is Ana Rosa Quintana, do you think she cleans her house, travels by train, walks the dog and works all the day very hard? No. In the same way I can be a mother of twins at forty.
We are champion women!