tuesday, november 2, 2010 THE TV COLUMN 3LIVE TODAY @
washingtonpost.com/discussions Tom Shales chats about TV Noon • Janet Bennett Kelly and Holly Thomas gab about fashion Noon “
About 2 million people watched the ‘Rally to
Restore Sanity and/or Fear’
live on Comedy Central.” — Lisa de Moraes, C10
Style ABCDE C S RECORDINGS
Merry Mariah Carey offers holiday cheer; plus albums by Matt & Kim and Jason Aldean. C3
THEATER REVIEW
Teatro de la Luna’s festival spirit “Mi Marido” is a spicy start to the showcase. C3
KIDSPOST SIGNING OFF
by Manuel Roig-Franzia in long beach, calif.
The flotilla of publicists, assistants and advance people orbiting California’s first lady like to refer to themselves as “Team Maria.” They inhabit a time- space continuum some of them call “Maria World.” In Maria World, Maria Shriver does the narrating. She wants to tell her story, to own it, to define it, to define herself. She emotes onstage and in best- selling books, speaking and writing poignantly about personal moments, bringing audiences and readers to tears with moving, well-crafted testimo- nials about overcoming her fears, the pain of losing her mother, Eunice Kennedy Shriver, and the trials of motherhood. Her engaging voice and enduring star power com- bine to forge a highly marketable, though still- evolving, model — part motivational speaker, part Alzheimer’s research and women’s empowerment activist, part pop psychologist and advice guru. Her life story underpins it all, lending instant credibility and visibility. But, for this onetime television report- er and anchor, relinquishing control over the story- telling can be unsettling. An innocuous question — “What are your plans when your tenure as first lady ends in January?” — sets her off one afternoon during an interview at a health-care event that she’s organized in advance of the final installment of her much-lauded annual women’s conference here. Shriver’s eyes flash. Her jaw hardens. “Everybody asks me all day, ‘Are you leaving?
What are you going to do next? Are you going to run for office?’ ” she says, leaning against a railing in a pyramid-shaped arena at California State University at Long Beach. “That’s why I don’t do interviews — because people ask me that question all the time.” It’s curious — and kind of sad — to hear Shriver, 54, complain about being interviewed. She spent the greater part of her adult life seeking comment and chasing interviews, landing some big names in her long network TV career, such as Philippine Presi- dent Corazon Aquino, Jordan’s King Hussein and Cuban strongman Fidel Castro. In her 2000 book, “Ten Things I Wish I’d Known Before I Went Out Into the Real World,” she reminisces fondly about “crawling on all fours under a table” at Cannes to beat the competition to an interview with Robert
shriver continued on C5
MANY TITLES: California’s first lady has also been a TV journalist, author and philanthropist.
AND MOVING ON
Step lightly if you ask Maria Shriver, soon to be California’s former first lady, about her path forward
Why we’re voting Making sense of the midterm elections occurring across the country today. C10
37
Te number of seats in the Senate to be decided tod Senators face reelection every six years. Only one loc Senate seat, in Maryland, is being decided tod
JONATHAN ALCORN FOR THE WASHINGTON POST BOOK WORLD THE RELIABLE SOURCE Roxanne Roberts and Amy Argetsinger
Thinking about drapes in case it’s curtains for Madam Speaker
new furniture, paint and carpet. Not officially, of course. “Right now, our entire team
I
is 100 percent focused on getting people out to vote tomorrow,” Boehner press secretary Michael Steel told us Monday. “What comes after that, we’ll figure out after.”
But all signs point to Boehner inheriting the Hill’s
sweetest piece of real estate, a sweeping second-floor office suite on the west side of the Capitol with a private balcony, fireplace and a spectacular view of the Mall. Like her predecessors, Nancy Pelosi put her own stamp on the rooms (fresh flowers, bowls of chocolate) when she moved in four years ago. “Before it was a very dark place,” she told CBS last month. “Looked like a men’s club. I guess there was a reason for that.” Pelosi did not, as some claimed, paint the red walls in the outer hallway into a Democratic-friendly blue. But she was the first speaker to post a quirky tour of the office — “Capitol Cat Cam”— on YouTube in 2009.
reliable source continued on C2
f all those polls and pundits are right, House Minority Leader John Boehner is not only measuring the drapes in the speaker’s office, but picking out
he was a child of incest, a born goddess, a queen by 18 — and possibly the richest mag- nate in the Mediterranean before she turned 20. By 21, she was cavorting in bed with the most powerful emperor of her day, all in the service of her country. She married her brothers when she needed them, mur- dered them when she didn’t. In time, she became a mother of four. But family con- cerns never crimped her. The fathers of her children were always somewhere else, on the other side of a sea, already married. Which left time to raise armies, build fleets, run with the big boys. She was Cleopatra, last of the great Egyptian pharaohs. Isn’t history fun? If you think two millennia of dusty re- search and hoary legend have told us all we need to know about this woman, you’re in for a surprise. Stacy Schiff, a Pul- itzer Prize-winning author of three highly praised biographies — of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Véra Nabokov and Benja- min Franklin — has dug through the ear- liest sources on Cleopatra, sorted through myth and misapprehension, tossed out the chaff of gossip, and delivered up a spirited life. First, she was not Egyptian; she was Greek. She was not dark-skinned; more like honey. If she and her ancestors murdered one another, they consid- ered it no crime; if they practiced incest, there was never a word for it. She was hardly beautiful by Hollywood standards — no Angelina Jolie, mind
S
A queen-size accomplishment: Cleopatra brought fully to life
by Marie Arana
CLEOPATRA A Life
By Stacy Schiff Little, Brown. 368 pp. $29.99
you. She was tiny, birdlike, with a pronounced hooked nose. She spoke numerous languages and was a gifted orator. She liked sex, but liked a good conversation better. She was no nymphomaniac: It is likely that Julius Caesar deflowered her. And, no, she wasn’t delivered to him in a rug, as Elizabeth Taylor was delivered to Richard Burton; she came in a sturdy bag, tied with string, slung over a Sicilian’s shoulder. Schiff is especially skilled at limning the social contours of the story. The Ro- mans were warriors, hooked on con- quest, hard on women. To make wealth they needed to build empire. The Egyp- tians of Alexandria, on the other hand, were cultured, inventive, masters of the intellect. They built a vast library to prove it. They were astronomers for cen- turies before Rome even existed. Theirs was a city of mechanical marvels, and it boasted among its novelties “automatic doors and hydraulic lifts, hidden tread- mills and coin-operated machines.” But Alexandria was also a paradise of per- fumes, a repository of the arts, an agri- cultural wonder — a center that could feed and amuse its people in equal meas- ure. If Cleopatra had needed to, she sin-
gle-handedly could have fed all of Rome. The differences between Rome and Egypt were nowhere so acute as in the ways they treated wom- en. In Egypt, the females negotiated their mar- riages. They inherited alongside brothers, owned property independently. If a husband was finan-
book world continued on C10
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56