!Like so many of us during this pandemic I find myself home alone snuggled up with my fur kids this holiday season. Recalling a historical moment that I witnessed first hand makes this time of Covid fear accompanied by vaccine rush and Russian hacking even more surreal. I worked as a journalist at The White House New Years Eve ushering in 2000, the millennium. It was an evening I’ll always remember, one that despite terrorism fears, enabled frontline memories of optimism for the new century, memories unlike the gruesome ones facing healthcare workers today just 20 years later. I was fortunate to work both sides of the rope line at President Bill Clinton and First Lady Hillary Clinton’s White House party of the century. It was truly Hollywood on the Potomac and looking back, a time that seems almost a fantasy world.
While the Times offers David Kelley and Hugh Grant a chance to slap each other on the backs for the finale of “The Undoing,” word of mouth offers an abundance of disgruntled watchers who sat through the multiple inaccuracies of life on the upper east side expecting something unexpected as a payoff. Not only did we find out that the obvious was the right answer all along, but we learned that there were hidden references in this mediocre melodrama. Turns out that “The Undoing” was really about Trump, another narcissistic man who of course can be compared to a psychopathic killer because in the words of Hugh Grant, “he knows intellectually that he lost the election, but when he’s arguing that it was fixed, he believes every word of it.” (NYTimes 12/2/2020) Other deep thoughts are offered by screenwriter Kelley, ” Power and money accomplish results that are not available to ordinary people.” And this “He (actor Hugh Grant) really wanted him to be a monster….He really wanted to go for it. He urged us to make him a monster.”