constipation (I love the delicacy-induced pause), the ad for Liberty Mutual Insurance in which the woman jeers at the coverage offered by a rival company: “What are you supposed to do, drive three-quarters of a car?” I sit there mesmerized because Maddow has already mesmerized me. Why do I stay and dumbly watch the commercials instead of getting up to finish washing the dishes? By now, I know every one of the commercials as well as I know the national anthem: the Cialis ad with curtains blowing as the lovers phonily embrace, the ad with the guy who has opioid-induced . . . Like a carnival barker, she leads us on with tantalizing hints about what is inside the tent.Īs I write this, I think of something that subliminally puzzles me as I watch the show. She regularly reminds us of the singularity of her show (“You will hear this nowhere else” “Very important interview coming up, stay with us” “Big show coming up tonight”). She is onstage, certainly, and makes no bones about being so. Maddow is widely praised for the atmosphere of cheerful civility and accessible braininess that surrounds her stage persona. She now looks like a tall, gangly tomboy instead of the delicately handsome woman with a stylish boy’s bob who appears on the show and is the current sweetheart of liberal cable TV. Next, she removes her contact lenses and puts on horn-rimmed glasses that hide the bluish eyeshadow a makeup man hastily applied two minutes before the show. Maddow never changed out of the baggy jeans and sneakers that are her offstage uniform and onstage private joke. The skirt and heels, it turns out, are an illusion. She does not have to shed the lower half of her costume, the skirt and high heels that we don’t see because of the desk in front of them but naturally extrapolate from the stylish jacket. As soon as the show is over, she sheds the jacket and gets back into the sweater or T-shirt she was wearing before. On almost every week night of the year, at around one minute to nine, Maddow yanks one of these jackets off its hanger, puts it on without looking into a mirror, and races to the studio from which she broadcasts her hour-long TV show, sitting at a sleek desk with a glass top. In Rachel Maddow’s office at the MSNBC studios, there is a rack on which hang about thirty elegant women’s jackets in various shades of black and gray.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |