Doctor, I have this problem. Everywhere I go, I see Martha Stewart. When I turn on the television set at 5 a.m., there's her tousled head, looking in need of a brush, and she's making a cake filled with strawberries and creme fraiche. The next thing I know she's doing battle with Bryant Gumbel on the Today Show, and he's losing as she describes how to decorate a Christmas tree.
The next day her magazine arrives (how egocentric can you get having a whole magazine devoted to your antics), and my wife is reading it to learn how to double-dig the soil in her garden. Martha is just everywhere, appearing to be the sweet Scots girl that she is not, her gentle voice chiding us for throwing away our rose hips when we could have used them for Thanksgiving Day decorations.
It's not so much that she seems to know something about almost everything, but that she seems to be everywhere and into anything. It's a kind of nightmare, you see, Doc; wherever I turn, whatever I do, Martha seems to have gotten there first.
I don't know how this happened. One year there was no Martha, and now she is ubiquitous (that means she's like plastic, Doc, she's everywhere). She's on television, in magazines, on everyone's lips; there doesn't seem to be anywhere you won't find her.
What's wrong with that? you ask. Well, nothing I guess. But if it didn't bother me, I wouldn't be here for therapy.
Oh, I know, she proves that there can be life after 35 for an American woman who has reared one child, gotten divorced, is once again working and has the whole country by the throat. Or at least the eyeballs.
It's not so much that she knows so much about what she is telling us. After all, there must have been others who used rose hips for decoration in the past. It's just that Martha has discovered almost everything about cooking, decorating, gardening or whatever and is prepared to tell us about it whether we want to hear it or not.
And she does it with that peculiar quirky smile of hers, as if she were slightly embarrassed (but not really) to have invaded our living and family rooms with all this mostly useless information. And she's always so right. I mean, you just can't question her judgment. Everything is just simple and easy to do, and she's always (so it seems) surprised that you can't see it her way.
Still, it is hard to take Martha seriously. For one thing, she doesn't live or work in a real place. Instead, she inhabits a mythical land somewhere north of New York City and east of the Hudson River.
She's apparently never heard of California; nor, for that matter, have any of her advisers. In her appearances, snow is always falling outside, or it is hot and sultry and ready for a summer thunderstorm, conditions not too usual in most of California, certainly not in Silicon Valley.
For that matter, she never seems to have heard of working housewives. She has lots of time in the kitchen: No kids make their appearance, someone (but not her) seems to wash the dishes and husbands never intrude. Friends do, now and then, but not husbands.
It's the idealized world of the over-35 woman who is able to inhabit the whole house by herself and decorate, remodel or whatever whenever and however she feels like it. Would that that were so for the harried women and significant others that I know, the soccer moms and computer company females seeking to break the glass ceiling.
If they watch Martha or read about her, they tend either to curse her or envy her, or worse yet, to dream about Martha's helpful hints with little possibility that they'll ever be able to put them into practice.
But maybe that's Martha's great discovery and her virtue: that it is possible to dream about decorating the house for a party in some new way, that it's even possible to have a party, that one can afford a whole house of one's own in which to live.
The reality is that here and in all the country west of the Hudson River, Martha is a kind of fairy godmother, someone whose magic TV wand works on the other side of the screen, but not where the soccer moms and Silicon Valley middle management women work.
Would that it were so, that all women were as genteel as Martha, that they provided homes where every effort was bent on beauty and good cooking, low in cholesterol and high in taste, where dirt and clutter were magically never present, where friends showed up only when needed and were ever ready with a hug or a kiss.
But life's not like that, alas, and Martha's world is not the world in which most of us live. It's too bad we don't live there, even for a little while, but we don't.
Still I guess we can dream, can't we, Doctor? That's what I'm going to do the next time she shows up, dream a little. And that time shouldn't be very far away, not if I know Martha.
Carl Heintze is a frequent contributor to the Saratoga News.
This article appeared in the Saratoga News, January 15, 1997.
©1997 Metro Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved.