Deceiving smile. Don't let it fool ya.
I have this love/hate relationship with Martha Stewart. On the outside, she’s this sweet, domesticated, family loving woman who delights us with seasonal activities through her pretentious magazine and website.
On the inside, she’s a narcissistic and overly assertive over achiever, who happens to know her way around a kitchen and craftroom, with control issues. She’s evil. Her employees have said so.
Where she claims she enjoys bragging sharing her love of her collections, family recipes and gatherings, I can’t help sense a bit of bullshit coming from it all.
I’m not going to touch on her felony charges on inside trading. That just made her a even bigger icon!
I know she has a small militia of people that she rules under a tight fist to come up with ideas and recipes. She recruits her friends (the rich ones of course) and does magazine spreads in the middle of summer of a Thanksgiving feast on a porch for her November issues. How Normal Rockwell it all looks. There she is gathered with a family of 4 or 5 who are seated at a rustic picnic table. All are dressed in either Eddie Bower, Coldwater Creek or LL Bean outerwear (in 85 degree weather). Even the kids tolerate the scripted activities of collecting leaves and turning them into garland. Scrumpious epicurean, handed-down-through-the-family recipes of pumpkin pecan pie, cauliflower a la Aunt Mae, and great grandma’s version of cranberry/orange/ginger nut bread, then the root vegetables from Martha’s garden, and a turkey that would make Gordon Ramsay envious. Luminary pumpkins, velvet stamped leaves arranged in a wreath, table scapes with handmade felt placemats made by the children, autumn arrangements in antique vases of pheasant feathers and pussy willows(….umm, Martha. ……pussy willows are a spring bloom? Hmm? BUSTED!) adorn the screened in porch. We’re suppose to believe that she’s actually having a Thanksgiving dinner with these friends. It’s all made to say “Isn’t this quaint? You, too, can do this!”.
It’s enough to make you vomit.
My friend gave me some “Martha Stewart LIVING” magazines from 1999-2000 that a friend of hers gave her. It’s a 1/3″ thick periodical with glossy pages and a TON of advertisements. Which are equally pretentious (COACH for your dog!). Despite the fact that it IS a Martha Stewart magazine, the articles themselves were interesting. Keeping in mind that SHE, Martha herself, didn’t write them, makes it more tolerable to ingest the fact that someone else is just as knowledgeable in collecting vintage wastebaskets or came up with a clever idea on taking old baking pans and making candle sconces out of them. Knowing Martha didn’t come up with article ideas makes me feel better inside.
Martha is not a genius. She’s just a good bullshit artist business woman with strict ethics.
Maybe that’s the key to it all.
Make sure you hire a staff that you know is ALMOST as good, clever or as innovated as you are. Then set them loose to put together your website or magazine to look as if YOU created it yourself, giving as little credit as so not to give it away that you had nothing to do with it at all. Add your “Letter from the Editor” and a couple of little side notes that you’ve written and the guise is a win.
This then leaves time for you to go back home and clip the dead out of your roses.
And get your nails and hair done for the gala reception for one of your pretentious media friends who owns a newspaper conglomerate.
Where did I go astray?
I know my way around a kitchen. I can do crafts. I can wheel a glue gun. I can swing a hammer. I have a garden. I know animals. I have a multitude of collections. WTF?
Oh, wait, I don’t wear Prada.
Which is leaving me with an idea.
