Thursday, July 08, 2004
Compare and Contrast
Maureen Dowd notices that Theresa Heinz Kerry has a bad habit of distracting attention away from her husband on stage:
Long-faced guy, as some Bushies refer to him, finally found somebody to stand at the podium and give him an adoring look.201k February 11, 2004:
Heaven knows Teresa was never going to do it. Her attention rarely seems to light on her husband when she's at a microphone with him.
She's easily distracted, waving and mouthing ''Hello'' at the audience and languidly arranging her hair and the red-and-blue ''John Kerry for President'' scarves she designed.
She siphons attention from a husband who has a hard enough time getting it. Yesterday, she distracted the audience when she seemed to be trying to get young Jack Edwards to stop sucking his thumb. Sometimes she'll laugh and smile in inappropriate places -- she once chuckled while her husband talked about curbing tax breaks for the rich.
- 201k stands second to no one in our admiration for intelligent, independent, and even slightly eccentric women. In fact, we love them.
But someone needs to tell Theresa Heinz Kerry to stand still while Sen. Kerry is talking.
This is not a matter of anti-feminism, or any "stand by your man" stepford wife baloney. It's purely about theatrical body language. When someone fidgets next to a speaker it sends the visual message that what the speaker is saying is not compelling. It distracts the eye and the ear of viewers.
People listen with their eyes. This is stage technique 101, and if Ms. Heinz going to be on stage with Sen. Kerry she needs to learn the chops.
No matter how many times you've heard a speech, you have to remember that many people in the audience are hearing it for the first time. You have to sell it each time. That's the gig. It's what every actor, musician and yes, politician learns.
Every member of every performance of every kind has heard every line in it a hundred times. But when it comes time to deliver those lines to an audience they have to be as riveted by them as they want the audience to be -- otherwise they send the signal that what's being said isn't worth hearing.
