Frederic Leighton’s “Electra at the Tomb of Agamemnon” (1868-69), oil on canvas. Mourning and black become her.

Mourning in America: My big, fat (ancient)Greek tragedy

August 31, 2020

There they were, the first family of the United States, gussied up — with one tennis-ball green exception — in basic black, clashing with the red, white and blue backdrop and looking for all the world like a group ready for a New York cocktail party to which they’d never be invited. There’s a metaphor or two in there somewhere.

A poster to a New York Times article said they looked like a contemporary Addams Family, minus the kindness and the humor. Like Eugene O’Neill’s Electra (more on her in a bit), mourning becomes them.

Dems shine as Trump prepares 'festival of grievances'

August 23, 2020

Against all odds, the Dems, no longer in disarray, pulled off a terrific virtual convention with superb renditions of “The Star-Spangled Banner” (The “No Longer Dixie” Chicks, those kids on opening night); star wattage (Julia Louis-Dreyfus! Eva Longoria! Tracee Ellis Ross! Kerry Washington!); powerful speeches, particularly from the megawatt Obamas; and a clever roll call of the states that was part Olympic Parade of the Nations and part infomercial. (My sister Gina gives a shout out to Rhode Island, our smallest state, for plugging its fishing industries. “Little Rhody” has become “the calamari comeback state.”)

The four nights belonged, however, to so-called ordinary people, who illustrated movingly the failures of the Trump Administration.

‘A world elsewhere,” continued: Ted Cruz and ‘Coriolanus’

July 24, 2016

Much has been made recently about Ted Cruz going Marc Antony – the Roman general, not the singer – on The Donald at the Republican National Convention in a speech in which he congratulated the Trumpster but declined to endorse him. This sent some political and literary experts alike scurrying to Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar,” in which Antony – a Caesar ally who is waylaid by the conspirators on the day of Caesar’s assassination – turns the tables on the assassins in his famous “Friends, Romans, Countrymen” eulogy.

“I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him,” he says, but praise him he does, however subtly, sealing the murderers’ fates.

The analogy here is to Cruz’s call to “vote your conscience,” thereby undermining Trump’s bid for party unity. ...

Hair-brained

July 24, 2016

This has been a fabulous season for hair.

Let me clarify – not actual hair, which summer wreaks havoc on, turning fine locks limp and coarse tresses frizzy. No, despite its Donner Party-quality snowstorms, winter remains hair’s best season – low humidity, don’t you know.

But this is proving to be the summer of metaphoric hair. First, we have one of the great hair performers in history – Donald Trump, who accepted the nomination for president of the United States Thursday at a Republican National Convention that was by turns angry, hate-filled, surreal and meh. Then The New York Times – which often covers the city as if it were a foreign country – expressed surprise at some men here spending $800 on a haircut. The article was accompanied by a photograph of Roger Federer, whose stylists include Tim Rogers of Sally Hershberger’s downtown studio. ...

My big fat Republican wedding

July 20, 2016

The Republican National Convention is like a bitter wedding in which the guests start ignoring the bridal party to entertain themselves by showing vacation pictures on their iPhones.

It is a measure of just how dysfunctional the convention is that for two and half days it’s been dominated by Melania Trump’s plagiarizing of Michele Obama’s 2008 Democratic National Convention speech. Whether or not you accept the official, improbable explanation that has Trump speech-writing employee Meredith McIver falling on her Times New Roman sword, the fact is that the Trump campaign could’ve sailed past this by simply admitting that Mrs. Trump plagiarized the First Lady because she admires her – boy, is that going to be a great Dem bumper sticker. ...

Kasich goes his own way

July 18, 2016

Once upon a time, Gov. Krispy Kreme was my CPB – Chief Pretend Boyfriend. I imagined myself under the boardwalk down by the sea-ee-eeee yeah, on a blanket with my baby, swooning in passion as the waves crashed upon our bodies to the beat of The Boss blaring from my Hello Kitty boom box. We were like Deborah Kerr and Burt Lancaster in “From Here to Eternity” – if Deborah Kerr and Burt Lancaster were two beached whales, that is.

But what with Bridgegate and the capitulation to The Donald, it’s become harder to sustain the fantasy of being with my tubby little Luv Guv. So I banished Gov. Krispy Kreme from my heart, and instead promoted my WPB (Weekend Pretend Boyfriend), Rafael Nadal, to CPB status. ...

The hair up there: Trump and the age of transition

July 17, 2016

We live in wondrous, terrifying, complex, fascinating times. In the United States, we are about to embark on two political conventions – the Republican July 18-21 in Cleveland and the Democratic July 25-29 in Philadelphia – that offer productive change and stasis, the future and the past, though not in the ways you might imagine.

The motif of the presidential campaign is that Hillary Clinton, the Democratic presidential nominee, represents the same old-same old inside Washington, while Donald Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, is the fresh, brash outlier. But in fact, we’ve been looking in a mirror, and it’s the opposite. Clinton and the Dems, with their inclusive approach to race, gender and ethnicity, signal the future, and Trump – with his appeal to angry, white, working-class men – the past. ...