Wednesday, October 02, 2002

Steisand: Artist, Filmmaker, Expert Speller

Jeez, Barbra Steisand sure does take herself seriously. Check out this statement posted on her website.

She’s livid that her accusations of Timber Industry complicity in the Bush Administration’s push for war with Iraq have been trivialized by the moronic misspellings in her note to Rep. Richard Gebhardt (sp).

Babs says she dictated the message to an underling:

"Unfortunately, it was taken down and interpolated by a new employee who sent out a first draft before it had been reviewed or checked for spelling. On top of that, as Barbra Streisand ruefully recalls, 'It was faxed to a wrong number…my luck, a Republican.'"


Boy, I’d love to have been a fly in the dressing room while Barbra “mentored” her new employee in the wake of that unfortunate interpolation. I assume it was exquisitely painful.

OK, so some typos slipped through. It happens to the best of us. I’ve even let one or two soil this very page on occasion.

But Barbra is a bit more touchy about this than is appropriate. In her very next sentence she feels it necessary to defend her academic credentials:

"THE IRONIC FURTHER TRUTH.. Hidden in this example of diverted news priorities is the fact that Barbra Streisand is a former spelling bee champion, meticulous in her written communications!"


Spelling bee champion?

Was that the 2001 English Speaking Union Annual Spelling Bee held at the Bodleian Library at Oxford?

Or maybe the prestigious World Economic Forum Global Spelling Championship held in Davos every four years?

Or perhaps was it just some fifth grade project of an anonymous public school in Brooklyn back in the early 1950s?

Spelling bee champion? Is that the best she can do? And yes, how could the media have buried that exonerating bit of evidence?

Hell, everyone knows Steisand couldn’t have made those errors . . . she’s a globally recognized expert in spelling! She’s a visiting fellow at the Harvard University Institute for Advanced Spelling Knowledge.

She’s well known for her meticulous written communications. (I can see her dictating that sentence while throwing battered Grammy awards at her beleaguered “new employee.”)

But wait! If she’s so meticulous in her written communications, how could this sentence have slipped into her four-page long preening online biography:

“Convinced that 1998 national general election was one of the most crucial in recent history, she applied herself to the election of candidates and issues she felt essential.”


Oh boy . . . someone’s gonna catch HELL for this!!

I'll give Steisand credit for being a remarkably successful singer. She didn't write the songs, but she did recite the words in such a way that millions of people want to pay money to hear them over and over.

I think that's great. But it hardly qualifies her to have any more influence on foreign policy than you or I. If she wants to mix it up in the world of unsolicited advice why doesn't she just get a blog like everyone else?

Here's the deal: Let's let the BarbraBlog dazzle us with its meticulous spelling and I promise never to force people to listen to my singing.


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