|
BY candi strecker
|
|
ON TRIPOD
|
Kitchenette: Be like Martha! We'll take your inadequacies and make a meal from them.
Bernadette's Feast: The art of placid cooking, and when to order in.
Bernadette's cooking piece.
|
|
WEB RESOURCES
|
The Web Guide to Martha Stewart: Links, recipe archives, cookbook software, and everything you ever wanted to know about Martha.
Is Martha Stuart Living? A taster of the genius parody magazine (e.g. Martha's tips on preparing handmade condoms: "Let sit overnight in a vat of virgin olive oil and K-Y jelly."). Plus a shockwave game "Suing for Pennies."
|
|
RELATED PODS
|
Women's Issues
|
Cooking Community
|
|
I used to keep my obsession with Martha Stewart a secret. I'd hide my copies of her magazine under issues of Wired and Harper's when friends came over. I wouldn't tell them that my great recipe for Polenta With Pesto came from one of her cookbooks. And I'd let them think I was using my VCR to tape the X-Files, not her syndicated show.
But I don't pretend any more, because I've discovered I'm not the only one who's fascinated by Martha Stewart and her housewife gonzo approach to life. One after another, hip post-modern gals just like me are confessing that they, too, are mesmerized by everything Martha.
Our Marthamania might make sense if we were full-time home-makers. They're
the logical audience for her advice on cooking, decorating, gardening,
collecting, and entertaining. But we're busy young professional gals, from a
generation of women who were firmly told that we could be anything when we
grew up — anything but housewives. How can Martha Stewart, Goddess of
Domestic Over-achievement, be relevant to contemporary working women with
fabulous, well-paying careers?
Maybe it's because our careers have turned out to be a little less than
fabulous, after all. Maybe they're mere jobs, full of unappreciated efforts and glass ceilings and desktops that never get cleared off by the end of the day. As these petty frustrations pile up, home looks more and more appealing. It's one place where our efforts can have a tangible impact, where we can create a little cocoon of harmony and order and perfection. No wonder we occasionally escape into the fantasy of living our lives like Martha does.
And wow, what a fantasy it is. Country houses and summer houses and a New
York apartment, a garden with hundreds of different rosebushes and eleven
kinds of lettuce, a chicken coop where the hens lay pastel eggs, dogs and
cats and hives of bees, cupboards full of matching vintage dishes and
glassware. And every single detail — right down to the doorknobs and the
bathroom glass holding her toothbrush — is absolutely perfect and
absolutely right.
To understand what Martha means to us, take a look at the relationship guys have with sports. Some men make a living from sports, and quite a few play a little softball or golf on the weekends. But these participants are far outnumbered by the spectators watching ESPN and reading Sports Illustrated. Martha's books, magazines, and TV shows provide the same combination of escapism and entertainment for gals that sports provide for guys. We might bake a pie from scratch occasionally, or stencil a bathroom wall, just for fun. But most of the time, we'd much rather watch Martha perform these activities.
And just as there's a special category of extreme sports, life-threatening
macho stunts that make viewers reel back in their chairs with a gasp of
"Awesome, dude!", Martha Stewart specializes in extreme homemaking. She can
take any task to a surreal point beyond mere perfection. We Marthaheads
watch in fascination as she hand-rolls beeswax candles, prints sheets of
gift-Women's Zoneapping paper, then whips up a risotto with chervil and truffle oil (save the leftovers to make yummy risotto balls, she advises). In our own
lives, it's a major triumph when we pour a jar of sauce over boiled
spaghetti instead of microwaving a frozen package of Pasta Delight. That
doesn't make it any less enjoyable to watch her slow-simmer a sauce made of
perfectly sun-ripened tomatoes from her own organic garden and ladle it
over home-made lemon-chive fettucine. We may be too exhausted to do any of
this ourselves, but we relish vicarious participation in her busy,
productive life.
Another part of Martha's appeal is the force of her larger-than-life
personality. Like Madonna, she embodies Blonde Ambition: She's controlling,
driven, and demanding, and has an ego as big as the moon. She's fluent in the
language of style; a self-made icon of femininity. And like Madonna, Martha
is a successful multi-millionairess, an omnipresent Queen Of All Media. Her
name has become, in every sense, a household word.
There's also something fascinating about the way Martha upsets our
expectations of the masculine and the feminine. She deals with the
traditional, limited women's world of kitchen, home, and garden in a
thoroughly "masculine" way: with confidence, expertise, drive, and
entrepreneurship. In Martha's kitchen, there's no room for the touchy-feely
vagueness of a pinch of this and a smidgen of that. She's precise and
uncompromising, a scientific homemaker who enlightens us about the One
Right Way to do each task.
As women in a work world that still hasn't fully accommodated us, perhaps
we subconsciously find a role model in Martha. After watching her calmly dominate something as unpredictable as a soufflé, surely we can cope with budget meetings and marketing plans!
I know there are people out there who are offended by the very existence of
Martha Stewart, as if she's some kind of domestic siren luring women away
from the hard-earned career gains of the last few decades. But Martha provides a refreshing reminder that there's more to life than work. Even as
we joke about being members of the Cult of Martha, most of us retain our
sense of perspective. We realize that even Martha can't be as Martha as her
media image suggests — that her perfect world is sustained by hidden
armies of servants and hired professionals. We don't try to live up to her
astronomical standards and do everything perfectly ourselves; we're just
grateful that we can turn to her for guidance when we tackle some new
project, whether it's hosting a grown-up dinner party or repainting a
chair. Martha Stewart: She's a Good Thing.
Candi Strecker, a San Francisco zine publisher and freelance writer, would probably get more work done if she didn't keep her almost-complete collection of Martha Stewart Living back issues within arm's reach of her desk.
© 1997 Tripod, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
|
