I think my post yesterday was wrong. The Martha Stewart puzzle can be parsed more deftly.
Martha Stewart is a transformational creature. She has transformed herself from child of middle class New Jersey to doyen of upper class Connecticut. She knows the status code cold. Indeed, she has helped to refine and augment this code.
But the transformation is incomplete. By several accounts, Ms. Stewart sometimes treats friends, colleagues, and employees with small regard for courtesy. She is, to put it more bluntly, darn close to the original BOW.
It was as if Martha had mastered every detail of Connecticut grace…except the grace. And grace turns out to be an essential property of the polite classes, the opportunity of real wealth, the evidence of a virtually Asian detachment from the world (especially useful for women who have NOCD husbands who need suffering gladly), proof of what the humanists said was the real condition of high standing, and finally the only real emotion the WASP is obliged to show in public. Let me put this another way, those who wish to be, or to "pass" as, a member of polite society should not treat social interaction as a high contact sport and conflict resolution as a survivalist enterprise.
How do I know this? I’m an anthropologist. I looked it up. (Which makes you wonder why Ms. Stewart didn’t do the same. It’s not as if the humanists are banned or burned.)
Further to the point of yesterday’s post, this could have been the understanding that Ms. Stewart brought back from prison with her. Now this would have been both interesting and consistent with the status metamorphosis that is, apparently, Ms. Stewart’s only transformational objective.
I can’t take credit for this, because it was in the new republic, but the writer argued that Julia Child represented a real wasp, because she exuberant and idiosyncratic, whereas Stewart looks like a wasp, but without any of the exuberant idiosyncracy.
Super supermarket tab The Globe reports Martha Stewart is set to marry Microsoft apps granddaddy Charles Simonyi. The “paper” says the lovebirds have been “quietly dating” for about eight years. Yeah, right. What about Evi Quaid’s visits to “Villa Simonyi”? Quietly dating?
“He’s one of the world’s richest men, but that’s not what attracted Martha to him. (Yeah, sure… it must have been the ‘007 Love Parlour’ upstairs). They’re like-minded people who are both at the top of their game. They’re also soul mates who can talk for hours,” The Globe reports. Awwww… isn’t that sweet?
We’re kinda surprised Martha would go for a Microsoftie. Given her DIY roots, we’d peg her to fall for some open source geek.
A top reliable source tells NBC’s Jeff Zucker that Simonyi leaked that bunch of false information to the Globe tabloid magazine with hopes that jazz guitarist and Martha admirer Edd Townsend would back off and stay away from Martha’s Bedford, NY estate during the times when Simonyi needed to fly back to his home in Seattle.
Now Martha’s PR crew at the Magrino agency says “a can of worms has really opened now”. The truth is Simonyi doesn’t really want to marry Martha but doesn’t want Townsend around her either.
It was reported that Simonyi hired a “spy” to keep tabs on Townsend after one of Martha’s farm hands mentioned that Martha hid the guitar player under her bed to keep from probation officers finding him. All of this is most interesting to say the least.
“We’re still trying to contact Memrie Lewis in order to find out why Charles Simonyi would do such a thing,” a horse trainer told Zucker. “Edd seemed like a nice guy when I took two bales of hay up to Martha’s bedroom last week,” the farm hand added. “He might be a bit kinky but I believe that’s why Martha likes him.”
I stumbled across your blog while I was doing some online research. Martha Stewart is a genius at PR; she did not flinch away from her prison term but used it as a means of poking fun at herself and making her audience feel she was just like them, flawed and funny.