Be Like Martha: My Secret Obsession With Martha Stewart
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
I recall the first time I saw Martha, on her how-to-do-a-perfect-Thanksgiving PBS program. As she set the dinner table, she announced that each guest would be served his or her soup in an antique, turkey-shaped, glass candy dish. Now it’s one thing to have a clever serving idea. It’s another thing entirely to have the dishes. Since they were antiques, each of the dozen dishes likely came from a different source, implying weeks spent scouring the flea markets, all for the sake of a whimsical Martha dish-queen moment. Next she opened the door to her special dishware-storage closet, revealing pin-neat shelves with orderly arrays of glasses and goblets and platters and cruets and demitasse cups. In that instant I grasped the breathtaking difficulty of truly living like Martha. Taste is free, ownership takes money, but maintaining stuff on this level requires staff.
Once you realize the extent of her invisible staff, “Martha’s Calendar” makes more sense. The centerpiece of every issue of Martha Stewart Living magazine, this page offers us an imaginary, privileged peek at Martha’s Day-Timer. It contains three kinds of entries. Some are the practical kind that might appear on anyone’s to-do list (“April 8: Thorough car and truck cleaning”). Then there are the vicarious entries that allow us to imagine ourselves living Martha’s fabulous personal life (“February 18: Get guest bedrooms ready for garden experts”). The most fantastical entries imply a whirlwind, eight-armed, never-sleeping Martha, entries that only make sense if prefaced “Order the servants to…” (“August 22: Wash mildew from pergola and garden gates”).
