Happy Accordion Appreciation Month, all. This shout-out goes especially to my bud Yasmin Abidi who, knowing that every actor should play an instrument, is a maestro on one that guarantees her hireability. She’s also a steadfast proponent of the accordion and its valiant defender against any and all slams and jokes.
Maybe it’s the utter happiness of the accordion and the fact that someone has devoted an entire month to popularizing it and making it less the most misunderstood and most bashed of all the keyed instruments. But I’m in a vastly good mood, so good in fact that I have decided to make Elisabeth Hasselbeck my personal hero.
If you are not familiar with this blond, petite beauty, I invite you to swing down to the bottom of this page where you can click over to page 2 of this column and have a gander at her in motion on the essential tool of real life instant replay, YouTube. She’s the one with the pretty handkerchief dresses and golden tresses (one of the only people I’ve ever seen who actually deserves that kind of effusively Harlequin Romance description.
She’s also the one with the dirty mouth, shrill voice, and the ears obviously imperviously clogged with wax or cotton or worse.
Jen draws the line at Barbara Walters
Hasselbeck has always been opinionated. So’s Barbara Walters, for that matter. But The View’s famous Rosie O’Donnell / Elisabeth Hasselbeck “cat-fight” (it’s impossible for two women to argue without some guy trying to re-envision it as something pseudo-sexual), well, that argument really highlighted the difference between the way some people express their differences of opinion.
One of the videos posted on the next page I just adore – it’s Barbara giving Hasselbeck what amounts to the kind of Time Out you give a teenage girl who won’t stop yelling that you’re abusing her when you won’t let her go out to the mall after ten pm. There’s a difference between these two women that gets lost in the Rosie/Lizzie battle: Babs is a women. Liz is a child. And a really, really petulant one.
For that matter, Rosie is a woman. She, despite the fact that Hasselbeck never once gave her the consideration due to a co-host (answering a direct question, waiting for a point to be made before shouting an opponent down), managed to not only keep her temper but score some points.
Jen does some audience research
The audience for The View is an intriguing lot; you always know you’re in good company with the Jon Stewart Show, because the audience is with him all the way. They laugh at the same foibles, and cheer for the same triumphs. They are a crowd that is essentially homogenous in sense of humour and morality.
Not so on The View. I get the impression that the audience slants a little right of me (and a LOT right of Stewart’s). They like Elisabeth, for the most part. They like Rosie too, but they do more than tolerate Elisabeth’s intolerance. On the Jon Stewart show, she’d be taken down a peg for inconsistencies in her arguments, or at the very least she’d be ridiculed for her often naive but aggressive opinions. Rosie would do fine; she’d get an ovation for most of her comebacks to Elisabeth’s rants.
That brings me to my hero worship. Elisabeth has done immense service for my arguments that women can skate by a long, long way on good looks and thin bodies. Put her words in Rosie’s mouth, and you have a duck that won’t fly. You have a duck you’d rather shoot than look at. You have duck that’s as good as cooked.
Elisabeth is a good-looking woman married to a rich and famous man, Seattle Seahawk’s quarterback Matt Hasselbeck. Without him for a reference and her looks for an incentive, she wouldn’t have got past the stage door at The View, much less be given a coffee mug and a stool. Oh, and she was on 'Survivor.'
She’s the kind of woman I see all over the entertainment biz, unattractive personalities who get by on someone else’s sense of what’s beautiful.
That’s why she’s my hero. Without Hasselbeck’s obvious and YouTubed adventures, specific proof of pretty women acting ugly is surprisingly hard to hold up to the scrutiny of those who want to keep believing that people get successful, that they get “into the biz” on talent alone, and the fact that they look like models is incidental.
This Jen doesn't need anything painted white
When you point out the hideous and, well, just plain unprofessional behaviour of Jennifer Lopez (who won't work unless the colour scheme of her dressing room is just right), Naomi Campbell (famous for abusing assistants physically), Lindsay Lohan (who Jane Fonda says is great, when she shows up for work), it’s just too easy for people to claim that the high stress and excruciating scrutiny these women experience somehow can explain and absolve any acting out. I don’t buy that excuse for Robert Downey Jr., and I don’t buy it for Lopez. Some people just can’t behave themselves.
