Sara Tucker's Blog, page 3

Would You Want This Job?

Dolley Madison, the nation's first First Lady.If you were A-listed for a hostess job where you wouldn't have to (a) empty barf bags, (b) spray-starch your own apron, or (c) repeat “Welcome to Disneyland” ten thousand times a day, would you be interested? I would. And if I were in line for the nation's top hostess job, I would put my best foot forward and march.   So where are Bill and Melania? Has anybody seen them lately, handing out leaflets on the campaign trail and giving hope to the masses? No way. Melania is busy raising Little Donald, and Bill is busy being Bill. Obviously, neither one wants to be our next FLOTUS, which kinda pisses me off. I mean, it's not some paltry little pooh-pooh job, and it comes with some nice perks. Such as:
* A floral designer, a social secretary, and an executive chef. (See "parties," below.)

* A beekeeper and 70,000 honeybees.

* Respectability.

* You get to write your own job description. The role of FLOTUS is what you make of it, meaning you can pretty much do what you want and nobody will fire you. Obviously, a cigar aficionado who plays the sax, or a skin-care specialist who speaks Serbian, would bring new qualifications to the job.

* You get to throw a lot of parties. Although there's no official job description, the First Lady is regarded as the nation's number-one hostess. Not an easy task in Washington's toxic environment but way more entertaining than Bingo Night at the senior center. You gain points for putting political rivals at ease, and you lose points if they stab each other with their dinner forks. Dolley Madison set the standard. She left her calling card all over the city, and her parties packed the White House with so many Washingtonians that young people began calling them “squeezes.”

On the downside:

President Taft. My husband
has a similar mustache.* You get criticized a lot. Abigail Adams was almost pilloried for hanging her laundry in the East Room. Caroline Harrison was castigated for modernizing the White House plumbing. Martha Washington wrote to a niece that she was “more like a state prisoner than anything else” and that she would “much rather be at home.” Eliza Johnson spent most of her time at the White House upstairs in bed.

* You work your ass off 24/7 and you don't get paid. That's right: No salary. The idea, which goes back to Martha Washington, is that your husband will share his.
  My husband, as it happens, is very good at dinner parties. A regular Dolley Madison. He's French, but that shouldn't be a problem. Jefferson Davis was one of his ancestors, Mark Twain was another, and his mustache, which flips up at the ends, makes him look a little like President Taft. Keep reading and you'll come to his All Finger Foods dinner menu in five courses. He also makes an excellent steak tartare.
xo Sadie

PS: Can we get over the fact that our future First Lady might be differently gendered? A lady plumber is still a plumber, not a plumbess, and a female Airman First Class is not an airwoman. If the title of First Lady was good enough for Eleanor Roosevelt, it is good enough for anybody.

Chef Patrick's "All Finger Foods" 5-Course Menu

The other night my husband and I were fantasizing, over cocktails on our little balcony above Avenue Franklin Roosevelt, about all the dinner parties we’d like to give once we're back in circulation. (His recovery from a collision with a VW minivan is moving right along, and my recovery from an acute midlife crisis is progressing with cautious speed.) One of the menus we came up with is a five-course dinner of finger foods. The "mini-muffins" contain bits of sausage (a kitchen staple in our household). For an entrée, there's a choice of three: oysters on the half-shell, mussels (we have a method for eating these with your fingers), or poached shrimp with mayo. Main course: barbecued ribs with Vermont-grown ("Vermontoise") corn-on-the-cob, asparagus spears (the French consider this finger food), and steamed artichokes. There's a cheese course (of course) and, for dessert, an ice-cream cone or a candied apple mounted on a licorice stick. The recipe for the mini-muffins is one we clipped from the TV guide. If you would like a copy, send me an email. It's in French, but I'm working on a translation.

Pants on Fire! From the Department of Corrections and Clarifications

"The fact that the job [of POTUS] comes with a place to live is a plus for me, since I am essentially homeless, having spent the past five years living in my mother-in-law's apartment." —Questions to Ask Yourself Before Running for Prez

Correction: I am not a homeless person. That whiny remark slipped into a post I wrote one week ago, when my housing situation was exactly the same as it is today. Soon after I hit "publish," a helpful friend pointed out that I have "a nice home" right in Randolph, the town where we both went to high school. In fact, I have two nice homes in Randolph. One is big and the other is small. The Big House is at the top of a small hill, and the Little House is at the bottom of the same hill. The Big House has a refrigerator but no bed, and the Little House has a bed but no refrigerator. I also have a set of keys to an apartment in France.

And yet, I feel homeless. Why is that? Obviously, a question for a professional. (Warning: The following answer has not been vetted.)

First the Big House, the one on the hill. My parents bought it in 1945, and my husband and I lived there with my mother from 2007 to  2012; I have explored my relationship to it in depth. In May a "For Sale" sign went up next to the front walk. In June, the sign began to sag slightly forward, as if depressed. In August, a big wind attacked the towering maple next to the garage and a large chunk of it landed on the roof. The roof has since been repaired, but I mourn the loss of the tree, which you could see from the kitchen sink; a family of squirrels lived there. I await with a mixture of hope and dread the day somebody buys the house.

This brings us to the Little House. It is adorable and I love it. In May, I spent several weeks loading stuff into the back of a Subaru that used to belong to my husband and now belongs to my ex-husband (I lead a complicated life), and then driving the fully loaded Subaru from the Big House to the Little House, where I unloaded it. I did this many times. Then I took pictures of the Little House and put them on Facebook. Then I locked the door and returned to France.

The apartment in France does not belong to me. It belongs to my mother-in-law, who is in a nursing home. It is filled with her things. Her Louis the Umpteenth furniture, her Made in England teacups and Provencal platters, her designer dresses, her massive silk floral arrangements, her costume jewelry and elegant shoes, which I sometimes wear. To be honest, I am kinda tired of living with other people's things, however beautiful. I would like to live with my own things for a change. Hence, the Little House.

I have not yet slept in the Little House, which does not yet have a bed. During the time I was moving, I stayed with a very kind friend. I have stayed with lots of very kind friends over the past few years. Did I mention that I also have a standing invitation to stay with my ex-husband at his apartment in New York City? When I'm there, I sleep on the couch. Like I said, I have a complicated life.

When I say "I locked the door and returned to France" I am talking about the old door, which has since been replaced. That's because the Randolph Fire Department had to break into the Little House the night Polly's BBQ restaurant caught fire. Below is a photo of the Little House as it looked in August, after the restaurant was demolished and the back wall of the Little House was replaced, along with the front door. The Nicest Landlord in the World sent this photo to me in an email. He said my stuff, which he moved out of the way of the demolition crew, was safe. xo Sadie
Photo courtesy of Phil Godenschwager.

My Celebrity Quiz: Answers Revealed!

As promised, here are the answers to Wednesday's quiz. If you feel you should have been included here and you don't see your name, please contact me asap.

1. Margo Martindale  (above, as Mags Bennett in the TV series Justified) read a poem at my wedding in Randolph Center, Vermont, in 1981. The groom, Patrick Husted, was her ex-boyfriend, and the poem, which Margo chose herself, was “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love.” She won her first Emmy a few years after her star turn at my wedding.

Ethan Phillips as Neelix.2. Ethan Phillips lent me his house in the Catskills while he went to L.A. to look for work. Mr. Phillips went on to play Neelix, a space alien and gourmet chef, on Star Trek: Voyager, and I had many encounters with his exterminator, whom we always referred to as "the Bug Man."

3. Julia Glass was a copy editor in the Cosmo copy department when I was the copy chief, back before desktop computers. As chief, I hosted a weekly meeting where we ate croissants and discussed punctuation marks. Julie went on to win a National Book Award and I went on to write this blog.


4. Cosmo editor Helen Gurley Brown was my boss in 1979, before Hearst renovated the eighth floor of 224 West 57th Street and she finally got her own bathroom. Besides the paper towel that she handed me one day in the ladies room, she also gave me a Diane von Furstenberg wrap dress, four Tiffany dessert plates, and a four-leaf clover that she plucked from her sister's lawn in Shawnee, Oklahoma.

5. Martha Stewart hired me to help expand her business empire, which was growing at such a rapid pace in the late 1990s that she eventually ran out of office space and had to move some of her staff into a warehouse in Chelsea. My job was to edit recipes for wedding cakes, and my desk was in a corridor outside the men's room.

Composer Nico Muhly; we had the same piano teacher.6. Nico Muhly and I were born in the same hospital and had the same piano teacher: Florence Scholl Cushman of Randolph, Vermont. Nico’s mother, Bunny Harvey, introduced me to stuffed squash blossoms and his father, Frank Muhly, taught me how to eat shrimp. Nico wrote an opera that was performed at the Met; I quit piano lessons when my acting career began to take off, a chapter of my life that I wrote about in embarrassing detail here.

7. Bette Midler and I started our respective careers in New York City, then moved to L.A. We moved back to New York City at almost exactly the same time, and we were both so appalled by the amount of trash that had accumulated during our absence that she started a beautification program and I volunteered to pick up litter. (I actually met her face-to-face only once and I doubt she would remember me.)

8. Bernie Sanders visited the Randolph Senior Center in 2010, when I was a volunteer server. Senator Sanders told the Wednesday lunch crowd that Social Security is NOT going to bankrupt the U.S. government and anyone who says otherwise is full of crap (not his exact wording). He did not stay for the meat loaf.

Lost in Moscow for Condé Nast Traveler.9. Klara Glowczewska was the editor in chief of Condé Nast Traveler in 2009 when the editors of the Stop Press news section (RIP), Kevin Doyle and Deborah Dunn, sent me to Moscow on a writing assignment-slash-scavenger hunt modeled after the reality TV show The Amazing Race. One of my assignments was to find an all-night pharmacy and buy aspirin.

10. Jon Voight was just about to start rehearsals for Hamlet, the play that wrecked his marriage, in the summer of ’77 when he invited the play’s director to dinner at the Park Lane hotel in New York City. I was the director’s date. Marcheline Bertrand was there, too, and Angelina Jolie was asleep in a crib. I think it's fair to say that the production, which opened a few weeks later at Rutgers, was (a) not very good and (b) memorable only in that it changed the lives of everybody in that room. Jon Voight plays a minor role as the movie star in this book.

I Occupied a Toilet Stall Next to This Famous Person!

My Celebrity QuizWhether you are opening a nail salon or running for public office, it helps to have famous friends. I have 10. See if you can guess who they are. (Answers will be published in this space on Friday, September 2, 2016.)

Character actress who read a poem at my wedding.
Queen Latifah
Maggie Smith
Ellen Degeneres
Margo Martindale

Character actor who introduced me to his exterminator.
Danny Devito
Steve Buscemi
Gary Oldman
Ethan Phillips

Novelist with whom I shared a croissant.
Agatha Christie
Philip Roth
Brett Easton Ellis
Julia Glass

Magazine editor who handed me a paper towel in the ladies room.
Anna Wintour
Oprah Winfrey
Diana Vreeland
Helen Gurley Brown

Publishing magnate who made me sit in the hallway.
Rupert Murdoch
Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Jr.
Martha Stewart
Sun Myung Moon

Classical composer who had the same piano teacher as me.
Stephen Sondheim
Leonard Bernstein
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Nico Muhly

Singer who thanked me for picking up litter.
Luciano Pavarotti
Beverly Sills
Tina Turner
Bette Midler

U.S. Senator who shook my hand at the senior center.
Hillary Rodham Clinton
Donald Trump
Bernie Sanders
Francois Hollande

Editor who sent me to Moscow in February to buy aspirin.
Kurt Andersen of Spy magazine
Graydon Carter of Vanity Fair
William Shawn of the New Yorker
Klara Glowczeska of Condé Nast Traveler

Oscar winner who invited me to his room at the Park Lane hotel.
Al Pacino
Robert DeNiro
Jon Voight
Fred Astaire

Guilty (A List of My Faults and Transgressions)

In 1998, I was given special treatment by the Clinton administration.
(1) Stole candy from the Red & White supermarket (age 4).(2) Bought candy with my Sunday-school money at Merusi’s corner store and hid it under the Streeters front porch (primary school).(3) Told my little brother I had a “thinking cap” like the one in Rocky & His Friends (I didn’t).(4) Hit Billy Arnold on the head with a floor mop and he had to have stitches (age 5).(5) Deliberately made Marla Tewksbury bump into a post one day when we were practicing being blind on our way home from school. (6) Fell down on my way home from school and told my mother that Hanky Buerrman pushed me. (He didn’t.)(7) Flunked high-school geometry.(8) Flunked high-school physics.(9) Dropped out of college.(10) Got kicked out of acting school.(11) Lived in sin.(12) Told a tiny little fib on a 1979 résumé, but it was for a good cause (I needed the job). (13) Divorced (once).(14) Shook Donald Trump’s hand (New York, Hearst Building, early 1980s).(15) Accepted gifts from the Clintons (e.g. a wooden "keepsake egg," painted pink and inscribed "Happy Easter from the White House").(16) Have not been to church for at least two years.(17) Have not memorized the Constitution.(18) Have never provided a home for a shelter animal. (Meghan Cooley and I are working on this.)(19) Told a U.S. official that I was writing “a best-seller” (not quite true).
(20) Descended from Communist sympathizers (details here).(21) Used to dye my hair.(22) Sometimes spend whole days having pointless debates with invisible people.

IMPORTANT: If you know of other bad stuff I've done, or if you just have a vague but nagging suspicion that I MIGHT have done something bad or even borderline bad, I urge you to come forward now and not to wait until I am president of the United States. xo Sadie

My Position on the White House Bees

One reason I would want to be president is because of the bees. Do you think for one minute that either Bill or Melania give a rat's ass about the White House bees? I honestly fear for all 70,000 of them if either Hillary or Donald gets elected. My husband, on the other hand, keeps a pot of honey on the kitchen table, and every morning he slices his baguette in two and puts orange marmalade on one half and a big dollop of honey on the other. He will protect the bees.

Questions to Ask Yourself Before Running for Prez

Your new workplace.Today a dear friend suggested that, were I to become the first female U.S. president, I “would not like the job.” Her concern triggered some serious soul-searching. If you, too, are thinking of running for president (because honestly, will there ever be a better time?), I urge you to ask yourself the following questions, which I have helpfully bullet-pointed.

* Are you qualified? I answered this question yes, because the job is basically making speeches, right? I’m pretty good at making speeches. I can even write my own. In fact, I've been writing my own speeches since seventh grade, when I did a humorous presentation, in Miss Weeks's English class, about how to give your dog a bath (my former classmates will testify to its success).

* Do you really want to live in Washington, D.C.? The fact that the job comes with a place to live is a plus for me, since I am essentially homeless, having spent the past five years living in my mother-in-law's apartment. On the minus side, D.C. is hot in summer and I have absolutely no friends there.

* Do you really want a chauffeur, a cook, a housekeeper, a secretary, and a private jet? Of course you do.

* Can you live with the office email system? Because I'm told it sucks. On the bright side: You will have your own office. Not a tiny cubicle furnished with a drawer full of paper napkins and plastic spoons and a dog-eared copy of Words Into Type but a real office with an ergonomic chair and a door that you can shut.

* Can you live on $400,000 per year and a pension of $200,000 (plus a little extra for things like postage)? Yeah, me too. I mean, I've never tried it, but I'm sure I could manage. Besides, as the first woman president in U.S. history, I bet I could get an amazing book deal.

xo Sadie

Above: President Obama meets with a Secret Service agent and his family in the Oval Office (2014).

In My First 100 Days As POTUS

Dear potential donor: Have you noticed that since this wacko election season began nobody has said boo about what he or she would actually do on the off-chance that he or she were to wind up in the Oval Office?

Let me be the first.

If I were POTUS, I would be-quick-as-a-bunny to act on the following initiatives in my first 100 days:

Agriculture. IMO, every public school and federal prison should have an organic garden, and the kids and the inmates should do the work. Research shows that pulling weeds and experimenting with kale recipes is good for people.

The environment. America has too many lawns and not enough butterfly gardens. Lawns are basically chemical dumps. Lady Bird Johnson planted wildflowers along the Interstate; I will ask people to toss out their power mowers and plant black-eyed Susans and milkweed.

The arts. Our nation is in serious need of art therapy—just look at all the nut jobs in politics today. I propose Art Fridays, when everybody—carwash attendants, corporate vice-presidents, congressional leaders—gets the day off to make and appreciate art.

Reforming our criminal justice system. We need to put more animals in prison. Caring for a pet makes us better people, and a lot of dogs, cats, and horses need a loving home.

Notice my use of the subjunctive, above: If I were POTUS, this is what I would do. Because I'm still asking myself whether being the nation's chief exec is a job that a sane person would volunteer for. Will let you know my decision by the end of next week.

Love, Sadie

PS The photo is of a community garden in Detroit.

Sadie the Cleaning Lady

I don't know about you, but I think this would make an excellent theme song for my new unofficial presidential campaign. The song was a hit in 1968 and it's still popular, at least in Australia. Here are the lyrics. Would love to know what you think.

Sadie, the cleaning lady
With trusty scrubbing brush and pale of water
Worked her fingers to the bone, for the life she had at home
Providing at the same time for her daughter

Ahh Sadie, the cleaning lady
Her aching knees not getting any younger
Well her red detergent hands, have for years not held a man's
And time would find her heart in spite of hunger

Scrub your floors, do your chores, dear old Sadie
Looks as though you'll always be a cleaning lady
Can't afford to get bored dear old Sadie
Looks as though you'll always be a cleaning lady

Ahh Sadie, the cleaning lady
Her female mind would find a way of trapping
Though as gentle as a lamb, Sam the elevator man
So she could spend the night by TV, napping

Ahh Sadie, the cleaning lady
Her aching knees not getting any younger
Well her red detergent hands, have for years not held a man's
And time would find her heart in spite of hunger

Ahh, scrub your floors, do your chores, dear old Sadie
Looks as though you'll always be a cleaning lady
Can't afford to get bored dear old Sadie
Looks as though you'll always be a cleaning lady

Ahh Sadie, the cleaning lady
Her Sam was what she got, hook, line and sinker
To her sorrow and dismay, she's still working to this day
Her Sam turned out to be a nervous figure

Ahh, scrub your floors, do your chores, dear old Sadie
Looks as though you'll always be a cleaning lady
Can't afford to get bored dear old Sadie (fade)