Why Are TV Men So Incompetent in the Kitchen?

You’ve seen the Clorox Disinfecting Wipes commercial, as I did again the other day. An attractive thirtysomething woman in exercise sweats drops her tote on the counter, announces “I’m home,” and turns into the kitchen to find… her husband changing the baby’s diaper on the inlaid wood countertop! Whatta maroon, amirite? Garsh, all women have probably been through something like that! Whew, it’s like having to raise two kids at the same dang time.


(Clorox has another ad which reuses the exact same shots of the woman, but when the camera turns to her husband, he’s scaling a fresh-caught flounder on the counter, bits of blood and flesh scattering wildly. You decide which is worse on your food prep surfaces: human poop or animal blood.)

When this ad ran during my evening headlines this week, my mind flashed to an essay a friend shared several months ago, an op-ed from a British tabloid website, entitled “Male incompetence is a subtle form of misogyny.” Author Miranda Larbi makes a persuasive case that men who plead incompetence in household affairs are engaged in a passive-aggressive form of male dominance. When male incompetence resembles Larbi’s description, I agree with her argument.

But I’ve also noticed the prevalence of male incompetence as a cultural trope. It’s especially noticeable in fifteen- and thirty-second commercials, where the entire arc turns around one exchange. But once we’re aware of it, we find it more subtly integrated into most mass media, especially television, where the highly competent man suddenly becoming all thumbs when confronted with domestic responsibilities, is played for everything from pathos to cheap laughs.

The issue, whether for opponents like Miranda Larbi or profiteers like the AKQA media agency (responsible for the Clorox ads), seems substantially confined to the kitchen. The cultural current just expects men to demonstrate complete fumbling incompetence wherever food is prepared. Notice that the man’s problem isn’t that he doesn’t take responsibility for household chores; he cheerfully raises babies and prepares dinner. He just does so in ways that bring bathroom or garage functions into proximity with food preparation.

Again, the advertising environment seems a place where this thrives. The very short medium creates a sort of morality play in which men, often believing themselves highly competent, go full Dunning-Kruger on domesticity. Cascade, the dishwashing detergent company, has run entire campaigns around this theme:



This isn’t even my favorite ad from this campaign. My favorite, starring Mad Men veteran Sadie Alexandru, features a man enthusiastically scraping food residue off freshly washed dishes, while his wife makes a face combining disgust with “I want a divorce.” Sadly, this one appears no longer available on YouTube.

Critics will respond by pointing out that TV commercials aren’t reality, and aren’t instruction manuals for daily responsibilities. I agree. These are examples of low comedy played for broad laughs in an environment where the fifteen-second limit basically forbids deeper examination of themes. Commercials will always fall back on broad stereotypes taken from the larger culture.

But that means these stereotypes already exist. A full panoply of male boilerplates, from skilled professionals to manful outdoorsy types to ridiculous hipsters, is expected to turn stupid and borderline dangerous when entering the kitchen. Doofus behavior has become the default position for men in the food-preparation domain. Dudes like me are just waiting for women to bail us out.

Even the opposite of this position reduced men to one stereotyped position. Actor Tim Daly plays the husband of the Secretary of State on TV’s Madam Secretary. His character is a former CIA operative who, by the fourth season, is promoted to head of the CIA’s clandestine affairs division. Yet, interviewed on NPR, Daly reported that most of his fan mail, especially from men, has focused on his competence in the kitchen. His defining character trait, singular, is his ability to cook.

The pervasive expectation that men will be incompetent around food preparation encourages both sexes to conform to their preconceived notions. There might even be something anti-patriarchy to giving women a domain exclusively their own. Women face no glass ceiling in the kitchen, no male privilege, no lopsided competition where their confidence gets deemed “bossy.” Women can be women in the kitchen.

Yet expecting women to perennially rescue men from our own incompetence doesn’t just marginalize women. It permits, even encourages, men to not think beyond themselves. When male incompetence is so pervasive that advertisers play it for low comedy, that proves both women and men need to break our chains.

A Cherry Bomb For Your Eyes

Denise Bosler, Creative Anarchy: How to Break the Rules of Graphic Design for Creative Success

Let’s start with what I consider the most important point: graphic design professional Denise Bosler never actually advocates “anarchy” or “breaking the rules;” that’s a rhetorical flourish. We call them rules for a reason. Rather, she coaches graphic designers, like good attorneys, to know when conventional rules don’t apply, and respond accordingly. We’ve all seen the results when designers, thinking themselves bold and ambitious, ignore fundamentals like color, line, and shape. Bosler doesn’t recommend lawlessness.

Within this slim but oversized book, Bosler compiles a thorough, synoptic course in graphic design fundamentals. Bosler formats her book like those old-school Ace Doubles novels: hold it “right-side up,” you’ll receive an 88-page primer in rudiments of design, including exercises to experiment with making visually engaging images entirely from straight lines or primary colors. This includes a very thoroughgoing introduction to Bosler’s career specialty, type design. Today’s text-intensive world will thank Bosler for that.

Flip the book over, Bosler commences a 144-page whirlwind tour of various places where “coloring inside the lines,” as she puts it, impedes design’s purpose. Flanked by a generous selection of diverse graphic examples, Bosler demonstrates how working professionals lasso the rules to their own purposes. The rules Bosler teaches, which are common in academic art and design programs, guide apprentices with efficiency and grace. But professionals don’t serve the rules—the rules serve them.

Denise Bosler

This isn’t “anarchy,” not really. “Don’t second-guess your client,” Bosler recommends gently; “Explore his [sic] level of creative tolerance by asking him questions.” In everything from Peter Max-inspired concert posters and Bauhaus teapots to fin-de-siècle book jackets and neon bar signs, Bosler shows how well-done design elements interact with, accentuate, and complete their environment. Like people and tools, designs have their roles to fulfill. Nobody would call this anarchy; I’d call it more like synergy.

And what synergy it is. For Bosler, graphic design, like art, has context. Whether we’re packaging a product, or advertising to increase brand awareness, or simply making text inviting to read, design plays an important communicative role. When she shows how Penguin Audiobooks’ ad designers morphed Mark Twain into a pair of headphones, or how almost-invisible kerning and serifs turn illegible fonts into elegant graphics, she proves that design creates conduits between two human minds.

Despite the wide range of examples she musters, Bosler mostly keeps emphasis on two-dimensional designs. From ads and posters to books and fliers, we mostly encounter graphic design on flat surfaces these days. Household appliances and architectural marvels may have graphic components, which Bosler tacitly acknowledges, but she permits experts to retain control of the three-dimensional field. Still, considering our media-saturated contemporary society, she clearly retains claim on the largest design categories people regularly encounter.

So, since Bosler doesn’t recommend chucking that figurative cherry bomb into graphic design, what does she advocate? Well, she runs a complex gamut, from clean geometric patterns popular in midcentury media, to frenzied psychedelia, to digital shape-morphing in today’s world. Bosler’s examples and influences refuse categorization. True to her title, Bosler doesn’t attempt formulating any new rules or precluding genuine invention. She shows, instead, how innovative designers pave new roads by thinking outside textbook conventions.

I do regret one significant omission: I cannot recall Bosler including any examples of web design. Today’s code-centric world has made most of us digital design consumers, and the importance of our personal websites, Facebook pages, and other digital footprint, has made many people digital design creators, too. Web design creates important challenges, with the need to carry elements intact across multiple platforms and browser customizations. Slovenly web design is, unfortunately, ubiquitous in today’s world.

Well, slovenly design generally. We’ve all come across photocopied rock band posters that look like dribbled spaghetti, magazine ads apparently done by prisoners with crayons, and self-published books with teensy illegible type and missing margins. Advancing technology has put media creation within nearly everybody’s grasp, but knowledge of design basics hasn’t kept pace. While Bosler’s guidance may require some tweaking, even possibly an entire second book, to encompass web-based design, she makes a noble start.

Denise Bosler’s brief instructional textbook encompasses the basics of nearly every college-level graphic design course. We know it’s always harder to learn without a living coach, but Bosler makes guided self-study more possible. In today’s world, choked as we are with conflicting media messages and eye-strain-inducing graphics, most media design passes unnoticed beneath our gaze, mere visual static. Careful study of Bosler’s book, while incomplete, will help dedicated creators stand above today’s grievously crowded field.

The Identity Vendors

Kelley Lebrock's classic Pantene ad. Click
to enlarge and read the smaller text.

I never know how to process advertisements that claim a social conscience. Sure, in the video above, Pantene accurately spotlights the double standards that hamper high-achieving women in today’s business environment. Women shouldn’t feel impeded by judgments that only apply based on their chromosomes. But Pantene still wants to sell you shampoo. Would their sudden feminist turn have occurred if women worldwide felt okay with their hair?

This campaign is of a piece with Pantene’s classic 1980s “Don’t Hate Me Because I’m Beautiful” ads. Kelly LeBrock claimed she shampooed and blow-dried, same as any other woman, and therefore didn’t deserve women’s envy. Yet LeBrock’s highly styled ad, slathered in cosmetics, nevertheless reinforces the archetype that women should spend copious time on their appearance. Time they shouldn’t spend on jobs, or family, or… y’know… a life.

Such messages enforce class-based judgments on women—on people, really. Early male style icon Beau Brummell claimed he spent five hours daily getting dressed, which implicitly declared that he had five hours daily to waste on clothes. Many female beauty accessories, like high heels and concealer, originated at the court of Louis XIV, who was short and had smallpox scars. People mimicked these accoutrements in an attempt to look courtly.

Time hasn’t dulled beauty’s economic subtext. Pantene’s ad, above, correlates physical beauty, in the form of lustrous, full-bodied hair, with executive authority and wealth. In Pantene’s glamorous parallel universe, corporate accomplishment apparently includes a make-up team to smooth lady bosses’ skin tone and ensure they have no powder on their blouses. “Accomplish your utmost,” this ad whispers alluringly, “provided you never neglect your outward appearance.”

Promo still from Dove's Campaign for Real Beauty "Sketch Artist" ad.
Note how the "beautiful" image, right, looks more stereotypically Caucasian.

Attentive readers might recall Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty, which distributed an online ad recently comparing how women described themselves to how others described them. A police sketch artist created matching images. Not surprisingly, to anybody who knows women, the subjects described themselves plainer, dumpier, and less attractive than others described them. Barraged by unrealistic images of “normal” beauty, women become their own worst critics.

But the Campaign itself came under fire for spotlighting fair-haired, fair-skinned visions of beauty. Despite brief flashes of good-looking Hispanic and African American women, more than three minutes of this three-minute-thirty-second ad foregrounded white women, mostly blondes. The ad was as diverse as a Viking raid. Instead of subverting mainstream beauty ideals, it reinforced significant traditional attitudes, in a putatively empowering package.

Then, in the most appalling turn, it finished with an attractive middle-aged Caucasian woman stating that a woman’s perception of her own beauty colors her every other perception. If she doesn’t consider herself beautiful, it’ll drain her confidence, impede her career, and submarine her romantic prospects. So love your outward appearance, ladies! It’s the new, secular salvation! Wow, what a bitchslap to women not born with Baywatch looks.

Dove and Pantene don’t exist to uplift women or instill redeeming values. If you want that, buy a book or go to church. These corporations exist to sell you product, which they accomplish in part by first convincing you that you need what they sell. Your hair lacks shine! Your lizard-like skin needs moisture! We’ll fix it if you give us money! But if they said that aloud, they’d face outraged blowback, and for good reason.

This Eisenhower-era cosmetics ad is hardly a model
of enlightened gender roles. But at least it doesn't
pretend to feminist ideals it doesn't really possess.

Consider all the companies that actively tell women they’re currently inadequate. Hast thou uneven skin? L’oreal gives you that unblemished complexion. Saggy boobs? Victoria’s Secret will turn you into a runway model. Vera Wang and Calvin Klein will highlight your legs, butt, and whatever randomly selected feature fashion designers claim needs attention this season. And Prada accessories will make you appear wealthy and ambitious, independent but a good catch.

If women truly appreciated themselves, they could blow a hole in America’s economy overnight. American women spent over $33 billion on beauty supplies in 2010, according to the Commerce Department—enough to provide clean water, decent nutrition, and a high-school education to the entire developing world, twice. Yet according to my doctor, most women could achieve similar beauty effects by exercising, watching their diet, and drinking adequate quantities of water.

I like and admire women. So when major American corporations try to pitch uplifting messages, I want to thank them. But I can’t separate the moral lessons Pantene, Dove, and other corporations peddle, from their deeper business model. Even in telling women to seize their own destiny, these companies ultimately profit by selling dissatisfaction and want. Sometimes the message matters. But sometimes we can’t divide the message from the messenger.

Curtain Up on the New Political Vaudeville

President Obama’s decision to place his required disclosure statement at the top of recent campaign ads markedly shifts the tone of presidential campaigning, though in a way not obvious at first. By spotlighting what we’re about to see, instead of acknowledging what we’ve just seen, he gives us permission to perceive his words in an entirely new way. A simple rhetorical shift admits a truth that has lingered beneath politics for years.

Since the McCain-Feingold Act of 2002 made mandatory the “I’m <Candidate’s Name> and I approve this message” disclaimer, we’ve mainly heard these words at the end of an ad. Especially in ads meant to stir up strong negative feelings, that conclusion has distinct psychological impact. Notice this notorious 2004 ad, in which President Bush’s very name serves to relieve the fear of imminent pain and death:


This makes a seamless blend of theatre, politics, and storytelling. Notwithstanding how you perceive this historic ad, or its effect on the 2004 election, it makes good art. The cinematic production values make Ronald Reagan’s “Morning In America” ads look clunky by comparison. And the disclaimer at the end announces in essence: you have just watched theatre. I, George W. Bush, am real. In life, as in theatre, I am the solution to fear.

President Obama reverses this. He announces at the outset that we will now see theatre, and we go in expecting to see art. People who follow politics already know this, and the discourse is dominated by drama. Conservatives want to refight the “hippies vs. squares” culture war of 1968. Liberals play off the accomplishments of the labor movement after World War II. Neither wants to run on the powerful but incomprehensible issues which dominate current governance.

Traditional advertising tries to present itself as reality. Ad buyers want us to believe we could really make this car go zero to 60 in seven seconds, or get our shirts this shiny with this detergent. And political ads try to achieve this same goal: a vote for me will spearhead the reality I advocate, and a vote for my opponent will lead to dystopia. But they cannot achieve this goal if they acknowledge their campaigns are engaged in art, not governance.

So they move their disclaimers to the end. Even if it only lasts twenty-five seconds, we have to believe campaign ads as completely as we believe ads for Viagra or liquor. We withhold the admission that, oops, this is art. Not so President Obama. He admits—not implicitly, but explicitly—that a gap exists between campaign promises and the realities of governance. These, he says, are my words. Judge them only as that.

Commentators like Matt Taibbi have declared unambiguously that most of us cannot understand the real questions candidates have to deal with today. Events like the 2007 economic meltdown or global warming are so massively complex that, without extensive study, ordinary voters cannot encompass their labyrinthine nuances. Yet candidates rely on ordinary voters if they want to get their feet in the door.

By ballyhooing the theatrical nature of his ads, President Obama admits we cannot really understand the issues in play. We can listen to what candidates say, but we must also look at their respective actions. Thus Obama invites us to look at his record on the national stage, which he apparently believes Americans will find, on balance, positive. Thus he could not have made this choice in 2008, when many Americans still didn’t know him.

Calling attention to theatre’s theatrical nature could go either way. Shakespeare’s “rude mechanicals” in A Midsummer Night’s Dream stage a play for the king’s coronation, but feel the need to remind the audience that they’re watching a play. Shakespeare plainly considers these amateur actors to be rubes worthy of our disdain.

But Thornton Wilder’s Our Town centers on the narration of the Stage Manager, who repeatedly calls attention to the theatrical conventions around him. He encourages us to consider the play with cool intellectual distance. Despite being adulterated by uncounted sentimental high school productions, this distancing effect has made Our Town a legitimate classic.

President Obama thus is taking a chance. He trusts us voters to perceive his campaign as Our Town, not Quince and Bottom. Anybody who has sat through a Bertolt Brecht snoozer knows self-conscious theatre can drain the audience. But current authors like Susan-Lori Parks draw attention to their art, and audiences love her. We, the President’s audience, will give our binding theatrical review this November.

The Little Ad That Could, Did, and Still Does

Not long after I started at the factory, the line was manufacturing a unit with an unusual added component, a bypass screen. Only engineers fathom the purpose of this strange plastic basket, shaped like a Chinese lantern and absurdly difficult to force into the other components. But work is work, and I dutifully took to forcing these sticky plastic annoyances into their slot on the filtration elements.

Fifteen minutes into my turn with the screens, a paper rectangle drifted down from the recesses of my part bin and dropped onto the line before me. I could see two business cards stapled together, with something folded between them. I couldn’t afford to examine it with the line running, so I stuck it in a corner of the bin and kept working. But when a machine went cockeyed a few minutes later, I picked the item up to take a gander.

The front business card announced Arlo and Nancy Stark, owners of A&N Plastic Molding, Inc., of Hastings, Nebraska—presumably a company with whom my employer holds a contract. Though the card gave an address and business phone, it included no e-mail or website, and a Google search later revealed only third-party sites.  The back read: “Thank you! Have coffee on A&N, 7-1-11.”

Folded between the two cards was a dollar bill.

Brief discussion with management led to the agreement that the dollar belonged to me. But much longer discussion among workers, after the line resumed running, led to the agreement that this company is smarter than quite a few better-funded and more aggressive companies. This small regional parts manufacturer did something most large corporations could not do: it got workers talking.

Boxes surrounded us on all sides, branded with supplier logos and websites. Sheaves of paperwork emblazoned with catchy mottoes fall out of every package and pamphlet. Workers have their hands in branded components every day. But none got us talking. This single pair of business cards, worth maybe a dime, with the folded bill between them, jumped out of that mess and made a real impression.

Mark Hughes, in his marketing textbook Buzzmarketing: Get People to Talk About Your Stuff, advocates finding techniques to produce exactly this result. He recounts his own exploits finding ways to make people talk about his products, like getting a town to rename itself in honor of his dot-com start-up. Yet I have a hard time imagining he would have thought up this small, simple gesture, or the results it generated.

Hughes discusses finding new advertising media in today’s cluttered market. But he mentions, for instance, labelling his brand on urinal mats for the men’s room, or slapping his URL on the back of fortune cookie fortunes. Considering my adverse reaction when I see ads in public restrooms, I can’t imagine what Hughes thought when he selected urinal mats. Did he want me to angrily reject his product in advance?

By contrast, I can imagine what A&N thought as they tossed that folded dollar into a box of product, destined for a worker they would never meet. I suppose, in doing this, they must have asked themselves two questions:

1. What end user ultimately handles our product?
2. What does that user need?

Marketing professors might say the end user is whoever purchases the filters we manufacture. But I assert that such consumers will never open our filters to see what goes on inside the stainless steel shells. As long as the filters work, one plastic component will never cross their minds, or meet their eyes. We on the assembly line were the last humans to lay eyes on those bypass screens, probably forever.

The product brand did not intrude upon my time, as it would if it dropped out of my fortune cookie in the middle of family dinner. It was relevant to what I was doing at the time. And, though the company could not have known it would fall into the hands of a graveyard shift worker, the handwritten message offered the one thing most of us want at the end of a tiring shift: a hot cup of joe.

Today’s media landscape is awash in ads, most of which never penetrate our consciousness. Technologies like pop-up blockers and TiVo shield us from unwanted advertising. But by showing customers respect, and giving them something they need, A&N turned ordinary advertising into a meaningful connection. Which is why, six months later, I remember the incident, and still have their simple folded dollar.

The Hollow Life

Sarah has recently taken to watching those home shows on cable TV. The HGTV network is dominated by two kinds of programs. On the one hand, shows like House Hunters and Property Virgins show people trying to come into possession of houses. On the other, shows like Bath Crashers and Design on a Dime let people who already own houses remake them in a newer, hipper image. A few shows, like Property Brothers, straddle the line and do both.

Shows of this sort are popular with cable programmers in part because of their low production overhead. Because they don’t involve scripts, sets, or highly priced stars, they come with fairly low budgets. For cable networks that don’t sell much ad space, that must be pretty appealing. But they couldn’t sell any ad space if the shows didn’t have a viewership. And I think the audience draw  for such shows speaks volumes about our current cultural condition.

Back in the Eighties, when media boosterism and the Reagan machine ballyhooed the belief that Americans had grown rich, shows like Dallas and Dynasty consumed the airwaves with images of wealth and splendor. By the Nineties, wealth became less important than the well-scrubbed but libertine parties on Friends and Melrose Place. Both trends represented not just our society’s aspirations, but how we thought everyone else lived, and how we wanted to live.

These myths about our social values did not reflect how we lived. The Eighties were not richer, or more viciously competitive, than anything before or after. In fact, the economic disparity that paid off in the current Occupy Wall Street protests began in the Eighties. Meanwhile, the best statistics indicate that even most people who consider themselves sexually liberated seldom have more than six partners in a lifetime, a number that didn’t fluctuate in the Nineties.

Instead, these shows depicted how we thought everybody else lived. We felt we had missed out on stacks of money and rampant casual sex, so we vicariously sat though depictions of how we thought others lived. And now, as the country suffers through the longest economic doldrums since the Great Depression, we feel like somebody, somewhere, lives in a comfier, more refined house than us, and we want to watch them.

Media professionals, of course, butter their bread with their ability to sell advertising space. The shows, news, and other programming that occupies their broadcast time exist to keep us tuned in long enough to see the ads. While many content creators like to think themselves aloof from such pressures, network execs occasionally admit, sometimes accidentally, that they customize their programming according to what ads they want to sell.

Watching Alexis Carrington devise small-minded plots to seize the family fortune may seem like an odd way to sell ad space. Yet Joan Collins’ undisputed glamour also made people hungry for Dior and Versace in their own closets. A decade later, Ross and Rachel may have lacked Alexis’ splendor, but they convinced audiences that their lives were incomplete until they owned suede living room sets and could spend copious free hours lounging at the coffee shop.

Poet and philosopher Wendell Berry points out that advertisers, by nature, sell a sense of lack. They persuade audiences that our lives have run hollow and that, unless we rush out and buy the latest slick toy, we cannot plug that hole. Blaise Pascal claimed we have a God-shaped hole in our hearts. Advertisers tell us we have a product-shaped hole. Unfortunately, in our noisy and cluttered modern lives, God makes a tougher sell.

America has a longstanding ethic of individual home ownership. Like the English and Dutch who founded our culture, we aspire to not have to share walls with anyone not of our choosing. Lowe’s and the Home Depot have compounded that myth by telling us that we can live in a spotless palace. And network programmers, who get paid to find inventive ways to part us from our money, pitch that dream to us in dozens of pre-packaged forms every day.

But just as glamour and sex lost our interest, palatial environs will tarnish, too. Ad execs will invent new dreams to make us feel disappointed with real life. Human being are not, at root, acquisitive creatures. Left alone, most people get more pleasure from friendships, art, or a well-tended garden than from collecting trophies. We have the choice whether to let salesmen blind us to ourselves. I hope we have character enough to refuse what hucksters sell.

"AHA" Said the Writer, and Kept On Writing

Writers are introspective by nature. Since our one constant resource is ourselves, we spend countless hours contemplating that source. Even nonfiction writers, dealing in areas outside themselves, see everything through the lens of their senses and experiences. So when the Aha Moment people contacted me, I immediately wondered when I had my greatest inspiration.

My blog first attracted their attention. I had no idea the production company toured the country, soliciting opinions from everybody they can find; I’d never thought about where those ads came from. Ads are ads, and they enter my house hoping to part me from my money. Why should they care what a writing teacher from the provinces thinks?

Although I get consistently positive marks from my students, and many express the desire to keep working with me, I’ve never gotten past the “pretender syndrome,” a common shortcoming among teachers. We often feel we don’t belong in front of the class. We don’t know enough—about our subject, classroom management, psychology, or whatever—to really count as working teachers.

And that’s when I remembered James (not his real name).

Four semesters ago, I thought James wasn’t paying attention in class. I tried to persuade him to take writing seriously, to respect himself enough to invest in his education. I did everything short of begging to engage him with the class. Though he showed up consistently, he sat quietly, staring at me, and repeatedly got papers in late.

At the end of the semester, after I’d distributed the student evaluations and retired to my office, James sauntered into the room. Most students are glad to be well quit of the class, and often never say so much as “hello” to me once they’re done, not even the ones who did well in class. I’m an imposition on their lives, one which ends after only a few months. So I was surprised to see James there.

He walked over, hands in his pockets, studying his shoes. I wondered if he felt bad about something. After a moment, James finally opened his mouth. “Mr. Nenstiel, I just wanted you to know, I went to a small rural high school. The teachers all figured we’d go to community college, get jobs, and never pay any attention to education again. So they never made us write just about anything.

“So I want you to know,” he continued, “that you’ve made me write more in one semester than all my teachers put together made me write all through high school. I think I only wrote two full-length papers in four years.”

James went quiet again. I assumed, as who wouldn’t, that he was about to tell me what a son of a bitch I was for working him so hard. I’d made him write three times as much, in one class in one semester, as he’d written throughout high school. No one likes being forced to do anything.

Finally, James lifted his head to face me and finish his thought.

“I wanted to thank you for that, Mr. Nenstiel. Because I always thought I was kind of stupid. I’d always been treated like I was stupid, and my parents and my teachers never encouraged me to set my sights high. But when you required me to dig down inside so I could keep coming up with something to say, I realized how much I actually had going on. I think, maybe, I’m kind of a smart guy.”

I blinked. I never expected to hear anything like that. I shook his outstretched hand, and he turned and left my office. I haven’t seen him since.

That was my Aha Moment. I couldn’t compress that into a sound bite, but in that moment, I realized what an effect I have long after I leave my students’ lives. For good or for ill, I’m now a part of them, and they’re now a part of me.

I still feel adrift when I try to anticipate and meet my students’ needs. Jargon like “lesson plan” and “pedagogy” only conceals that teaching is a stunt performed without a net. But while I still struggle, I no longer despair. Despite my doubts, despite my struggles, I realized, this was the legacy I was leaving my students. This was the mark I was leaving on the world. I was a teacher, and this was my lesson.

So now I keep writing, and keep talking, because that was my Aha. And you have become part of what I leave behind.

Let Me Entertain (and Inform) You

I first encountered the show tune “Hey Big Spender” on the Muppet Show when I was small. A perky Dyan Cannon in a cotton dress and floppy hat entered a pet store and traded lines with a chorus of puppies about which she would adopt. As you’d expect from the Muppets, it was all upbeat and playful. Imagine my shock when I saw the film version of Sweet Charity, the musical from which the song originates. This was a true vision of people in hell:





When a major computer company recently used the song “Let Me Entertain You,” from the play Gypsy, to sell tablet computers, I initially dismissed this as a typical weak choice. That is, until I heard two teenagers at a play rehearsal trading licks from the song in the exact style TV star Lea Michele uses in the commercial. Because advertising is pervasive in our culture, a commercial can influence how we perceive a song.

“Let Me Entertain You” is Gypsy’s unifying theme, linking young Rose Louise Hovick’s progression from a young vaudeville performer under her mother’s thumb, to her adult role as burlesque dancer Gypsy Rose Lee. Noted for her intellectual style and witty delivery, Gypsy Rose Lee innovated striptease, smartening the tone and pushing it to an art. But that doesn’t change the fact that she took her clothes off for money.





Musical theatre often appears intellectually lightweight because of how it gets manhandled in community and youth theatre productions. Many people never see musical theatre except in sanitized versions that pull out the shows’ teeth to satisfy our society’s desire to protect and coddle children. Because more ambitious shows run up more ambitious budgets, many working-class people never see the potential theatre contains.

A production of Oklahoma I appeared in glossed over themes of territorial ambition, relationship violence, and the anger sublimated in prairie life. I’ve watched productions of Dracula that elided both sex and horror. Few productions of Grease deal forthrightly with the show’s themes of gang violence, sexual exploration, and class conflict. Why do we castrate smart, ambitious shows this way?

Because of its fringe placement, theatre has the liberty to address themes and issues that more mass media shy away from. Finian’s Rainbow, which deals with racial prejudice in the American South, was not made into a film until that prejudice was largely controlled and abated, despite the play’s phenomenal success. Hollywood could have made stacks of money off such a film, but was too risk averse to actually take on the themes.

Advertising pushes that same inclination to truly bizarre lengths. Though TV ads do not manufacture the exclusively Caucasian environment they showed just a few years ago, they remain a world still remarkably free of conflict, controversy, or struggle. That includes poverty: working-class people who watch TV recreationally can be forgiven for thinking their plight is less common than it is, and blaming themselves.

I can’t pretend this is inexplicable. A realistic look at race, economics, and politics would make people feel anxious, which makes people hold onto their wallets. Since advertisers want to part viewers from their money, we can’t get too angry at them for doing their jobs. A pretty actress singing show tunes probably moves far more product than a frank evaluation of life’s hardships.

Lea Michele’s “Let Me Entertain You” ad emphasizes the singer’s physical beauty, amplifying it by holding her head still behind a computer screen while her hips and torso sway in a sparkly dress. It makes an interesting contrast to her character on Glee, notable for her artistic flair but social awkwardness. This ad turns Michele into a sex symbol, which is weird, considering how it smooths the edges of the song.

Gypsy first appeared with the subtitle “A Musical Fable,” because that’s exactly what it was. Though generally positive in its attitude toward the title character, it also describes the arc of descent as Rose Louise transforms from a wide-eyed child star to an aggressive, career-driven stripper. “Let Me Entertain You” embodies the movement as Gypsy turns her body into a commodity.

I really fear those two teenagers will not understand what that song means. I fear they will think it only refers to the entertainment capabilities of a computer, and that they will proceed into the world unaware of the possibility that life could blindside them. We need to stop sanding the edges off our lives, because we owe it to those coming after us to face life forthrightly.