Source: MSNBC.com
If you skip to 58 seconds into the actual video, you’ll see this power-couple having a little fun.
If you follow celebrity gossips sites like People or London’s Daily Mail you can see lots of the “Trophy Wife” variety of Cross-Generational Romance. I don’t cover a lot of those because most were the cause of a divorce. Not a good thing. Most such relationships also don’t last. But to my mind we have the wrong idea of a so-called trophy wife.
To me, MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell is the 21st Century Trophy Wife. The kind of trophy wife men should desperately want. Why:
She’s way attractive.She dresses well.She’s always immaculately turned out.Her hair looks great.She’s very bright.- She’s well-connected.
- She’s at the top of her profession.
- She’s professionally respected.
- She hobknobs with the truly great.
- She’s earned her own financial security.
- She makes wise choices.
- She’s well educated.
- She’s well dressed.
That list appealed to Alan Greenspan–once called “The Nice Man Who Manages The Money,” that is the guy who was in charge at the Fed during the good years of the US economy during the Clinton administration.
I see much here to commend Mr. Greenspan’s choice of a wife. According the the NYT he was married before but for whatever reason that was annulled and long-forgotten. He gets a do-over in my book. Plus he studied at Julliard so that absolves him in my book. And then there’s the fan-dam-tabulous way he managed the nation’s Reserve. I lived high under his reign. Sadly, I make the same salary today as I did 5 years before the end of his Fed-reign.
My take on Alan is a bright, quirky guy with a devastating sense of humor. You catch a brief hint of that at the end of the ice-bucket video. The kind of guy who would hand you documents in a a deadly dull meeting with a joke on top that, once you’ve read it and hidden it, makes you simultaneously suppress both a coronary and a need to pee. The kind of joke that means everything he says for the rest of the meeting will have a double-meaning. The kind of joke that means you cannot. CAN. NOT. look him in the eye again in that meeting, except he’ll force you to do just that. That kind of humor.
I like to hope he has some secret way of relaxing, beyond drinking Scotch and reading economics journals. Like binge-watching Laverne and Shirley dubbed in Hungarian. Or doing really crappy paint-by-numbers paintings and framing them for the master bathroom suite. I bet he sits around watching t.v. in 40 year old boxer shorts and a sweatshirt. What do I know! It’s just so fun to imagine this couple!
And I bet all of this type thing both endears him to his much-younger wife and drives her bats at the same time.He is supposedly, and rightly, her biggest fan, so I think she probably uses him as a sounding board sometimes for broadcast pieces about which she’s not sure. I think she loves to go away with him to place where no one has heard of the Fed–like their own home. Just to be alone with brilliance. Anywhere else on the planet he’d be recognized and they’d never be left alone.
They came to their marriage at 50 and 71, after a 12 year courtship, but a co-worker claimed they beamed at each other like kids at a prom. Their professional lives were their lives–up to that point. Ok, Andrea was divorced, but making it in television journalism requires more hours work than making partner at a big New York law firm. She had long ago decided against children in order to have that stellar career that she obviously loves. Likely she was ready to settle down–a bit. And, let’s face it, a guy who can steer the USFR can probably balance the checkbook with his eyes closed. He was a catch. Yes, a catch, even at 71. Especially at 71, when maybe he had time, finally, for a wife.
I can imagine at the beginning they penciled in dinners and had to ask people like Margaret Thatcher to take a rain check so they could see each other. I can visualize that first forkful of Chicken Piccatta being forgotten while Andrea took a call from Hilary or that the bubbles left the honeymoon champagne as Alan talked to the Chancellor of Germany. And then, because that was normal to them, they’d simply pick up their forks or pop open more bubbly and say “where were we…..” And they’d smile.He’d reach for her hand. Ahhhh romance.
In her book she claims claims she likes costume dramas and he loves movies with lots of car crashes. Sounds like a guy who plays Sax and clarinet, doesn’t it? His favorite office is the bath tub– I can just picture him working in the tub while she sprawls against the wall reading research for an upcoming interview–classical music playing in the background, a nice bottle of wine on ice nearby. They are private. Very private. They don’t do the social scene. I fully support that. With no children they devote themselves to each other and to their careers.
Did I mention they both love baseball? Cute? Freakin’ adorable. I can see them watching a game in bed–him with one of those silly foam hands [that he would bug her with, of course] and she in a jersey signed by half of their favorite team, and sharing a beer! See? Adorable. Who says it’s all about the 20-somethings. Romance, love, passion hits at all ages and to all varieties of intellect.
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