Lost opportunity: Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, chats with children during a visit to ActionAid in South Africa in 2019. Judging from photographs like this, you’d have to conclude that she and Prince Harry could’ve been king and queen of the Coomonwealth. It wasn’t enough. Photograph courtesy eNCA.
In the trailer for “Harry and Meghan,” the new six-part Netflix series that dropped like an H bomb Thursday, Dec. 8, with the final three installments on Dec. 15, Prince Harry observes, “It’s really hard to look back on it now and go, “What on earth happened?”
Boy, ain’t that the truth.
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Read MoreLady Susan Hussey, a godmother to Prince William and a lady in waiting to the late Queen Elizabeth II, found herself in the middle of a racial firestorm after she grilled Ngozi Fulani at a Buckingham Palace event to fight gender-based violence.
The Prince and Princess of Wales and the Duke and Duchess of Sussex are facing off with different awards in different East Coast cities featuring different members of the Kennedy clan…..In addition to dueling couples in rival cities with different branches of the Kennedy family, we get the contretemps over Lady Susan Hussey’s encounter with Ngozi Fulani at a Buckingham Palace event to fight against gender-based violence.
Read MorePrince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh (left), examines building models at the University of Salford in 1967. During a 70-year career as a working royal, he carried out more than 22,000 solo engagements in addition to being what Queen Elizabeth II called her “strength and stay.” Courtesy the University of Salford Press Office.
Among the photographs The New York Times used to commemorate Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh — who died on Friday, April 9, at Windsor Castle two months short of his 100th birthday and will be buried from there Saturday, April 17 — was a 2017 photo in which the natty duke faces the camera smiling amid a sea of red-garbed Canadian soldiers, who are virtually all facing right. It encapsulates Prince Philip, a part of and yet apart from the British monarchy, “the strength and stay” of Queen Elizabeth II (her words) through 73 years of marriage, the longest in British royal history, who served crown and country with a confounding mix of devotion, action, humility, crotchety humor and a patronizing snobbery that critics have called impolitic at best and prejudiced at worst.
Read MoreThen Meghan Markle and Prince Harry attend church at Sandringham on Christmas Day, 2017. Photograph by Mark Jones.
Just how damaging was the interview Oprah Winfrey did with Prince Harry and Meghan, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, on Sunday, March 7 on CBS? Put Prince Charles’ revelations about him never loving Diana, Princess of Wales, together with Diana’s “there were three in this marriage”, multiply it a gazillion times and you have an idea of the damage quotient not only for the royal family but for the Sussexes as well.
Read MoreHenry Fuseli’s “Odysseus In Front of Scylla and Charybdis” (1794-96) depicts the Homeric hero navigating between the proverbial rock and the hard place — kind of like the Republicans wanting to oppose former President Donald J. Trump yet retain popularity with Republican voters, who still support the former president.
We’ve moved on from the trial of the century — involving former President Donald J. Trump’s second impeachment— but the fallout continues. The “magnificent seven” Republican senators who voted with the 50 Democratic senators to convict have faced blowback at home. Rep. Adam Kinzinger, the Illinois Republican who voted to impeach Trump and is crusading for a Republican Party devoid of him, has been shunned by family members, one of whom, a literal Karen, sent his father a $7 certified letter in which she stated that Kinzinger was “a disappointment to God.” (Does she have him on speed dial?)
Perhaps most interesting is the clash of those Homeric heroes (not), Trump and Mitch McConnell, a face-off four years in the making that began when the Senate Minority Leader, like Odysseus, tried to navigate between the proverbial rock and a hard place, voting not to convict to try to appease the Republican base but then offering a blistering rebuke of Trump’s behavior before, during and after the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol to try to woo back skittish Republican donors.
Read MoreMeghan and Harry, the Duchess and Duke of Sussex, take part in a welcoming ceremony in New Zealand in October, 2018. It was clear early on that the ribbon-cutting lifestyle of the royals would not be for them. Courtesy Office of the Governor-General of New Zealand.
Amid the throes of Brexit, Harry and Meghan have staged what the media is calling a Megxit. The couple is stepping back as senior royals to divide their time between Great Britain and the continent the British lost — that would be North America — while somehow still remaining in the royal family.
Wow. Just wow.
Read MoreMore thoughts on the royal wedding
Clothing is a powerful symbol. Meghan, Duchess of Sussex’s modern, romantic wedding dress by Givenchy was a nod to the goddesses he dressed – Princess Grace of Monaco, Audrey Hepburn and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, among them – as well as to the woman who now heads the house, Clare Waight Keller, its first female artistic director. The columnar effect of that simply elegant dress …
