Well, the first month of 2017 is over, and I think I’m speaking for a lot of people when I say it’s not looking a whole lot better than the last month of 2016.
U.S. President Donald Trump is wielding his executive pen like Barney from The Flintstones wielding his club. It looks like under Trump’s reign he’s just going to set up a big oil drain pan in the States and get Justin to turn on the taps.
And, oh, yes, that nasty man from the Dragons’ Denwho is basically Trump with a bigger vocabulary hopes to be the next leader of the Conservative Party of Canada. There’s much more bad news that we simply can’t bear repeating.
But, to top it off, we lost Mary Tyler Moore.
I don’t often choke up when celebrities die. Yes, we’ve lost a lot in the last year or so who trigger poignant memories.
But Moore was bigger than just another lost celebrity for me and a lot of women. For a generation of women (and women journalists) she was what Obama is to black America. “You’re going to make it after all” – the lyrics to her theme song for The Mary Tyler Moore Show– were the “Yes, we can” of the Obama years. Not to mention “love is all around.”
So when the media just kept replaying that song last week, there was a catch in my throat.
She inspired me to go into journalism at a time when the guidance counsellor at our school told me that I should become a secretary – “because there’ll always be a need for secretaries.” Her advice, however, should be taken in context. We didn’t get along as I had refused to go on her beloved annual field trip to Madame Runge’s clothing store in Vancouver to learn how to dress well. So, understandably, she had basically given up on my “potential.”
However in a lame defence of my guidance counsellor, there weren’t a whole lot of career options offered to girls in 1970. Nursing and teaching were considered the main ones – if you left out marriage.
So when Mary Tyler Moore encountered sexism in her newsroom, and did so with humour and unrelenting spunk, I soaked it up.
It didn’t hurt that around the same time Washington Post journalists Carl Bernstein and Jonathan Woodward were investigating President Richard Nixon’s crimes in the White House.
Watergate and Moore were a powerful combination on TV when there were only six channels. The entire family – all three of us – sat glued to our old black and white cabinet TV every week in the 1970s. We dug into our Swanson’s turkey TV dinners on our folding tables as reporters acted like white knights fighting the darkness of crooked politics. I was hooked.
I often thought over the past decades of sending one of those sad thank you notes to Moore. The ones that make you look like a pathetic fan with no life. I kind of wish I had now.
I really hope 2017 starts improving. And, to be clear, I’m putting Gloria Steinem on notice. Don’t you even think about dying in 2017. Or 2018, or 2019, or 2020. Or ever. You hear me, sister?
Pat Tracy is the editor of the Burnaby NOW and its sister paper the New Westminster Record.
