Cute story I found about the Kerry girls

[whometense]

Today looks like it's going to be a heavy news day. So this is something sweet and light. The rest of the article is fun, too.

Vanessa, a Harvard medical school student, told of her father's attempts to tell her about the "birds and the bees" during her teenage years, saying that he turned "different shades of red." She said he takes time out from politics to offer her a shoulder to cry on.

"I broke up with a boyfriend a while ago, and I came home sobbing pathetically and Dad was so sweet," Vanessa said. "He just put his arms around me and held me and told me, 'It's okay. I know it's hard and it's rough now, but you will get past it.'"

awww....

[whometense]

1. And while I'm at light and frothy,

there was a really fun article by Janice Page in the Sunday Boston Globe magazine section about who becomes a celeb in Boston and why, and about how Boston treats its celebs. I didn't see any mention of John in it, but there was a lot of relevant info in there.



Link.

Quote:

We're a little funny when it comes to giving people the star treatment here. Chefs and newscasters, jocks and furniture salesmen, professors and pols - these are our biggest celebrities. Is something wrong with us? Maybe we're the only ones getting it right in these celebrity-obsessed times.

- snip -

How many other places in America hang on every word tripping out of the mouths of guys like Harvard president Lawrence Summers and Boston University's uber-powerful John Silber? What similar-sized community brings together business guru Jack Welch, cancer guru Dr. Judah Folkman, and Car Talk gurus Tom and Ray Magliozzi? Could any other city inspire hundreds of famous authors ranging from Robert B. Parker to Ha Jin, yet be governed by the often unintelligible Mayor Thomas Menino? And where else might an orthopedic surgeon named Bill Morgan be asked to autograph baseballs, just because he performed a bizarre little surgery on Sox ace Curt Schilling?

Even in the sports arena we follow our own gold standard of teamwork, giving our hearts more freely to the no-nonsense Tedy Bruschis and Jason Variteks than we ever will to a Terry Glenn or a Pedro Martinez. (Not that we'll decline your services if you want to help us win a world championship or lay claim to an Oscar, of course.)

Massachusetts has always been a place that rewards humility and shouts down the selfish.

Ever hear of the crab-bucket syndrome? As explained in Ron Suskind's book about urban schools, A Hope in the Unseen, it plays off the notion that crabs piled into a bucket don't need a lid, because if any one of them tries to escape, the other crabs will drag it back down, ensuring that they all share the same fate. If any town in the United States is the capital of the crab-bucket syndrome, it's Boston.

[TayTay]

2. Boy oh boy is that ever true

There is some genuine insight in that reference. It's so strange that the rest of the nation sees Boston as an elite place and we see ourselves as a blue-collar lunch-bucket place.

Do other towns have this cognitive dissonance?

[vinessa4freedom]

3. maybe it's because compared us...

if you're a "blue collar lunch bucket place" the rest of us are subterranean. Ever been to Rochester? Ahem...I believe we call ourselves "the flower city" but that's because "lunch bucket capitol of the United States" didn't fit on the city seal.

[rox63]

4. I swear

More people here know who Barry & Elliot are than know who Tom Finneran is. And that statement will be total nonsense to any non-Massholes.

[whometense]

5. Barry and Elliot are gods!!

Well, godly, anyhow. :D

[TayTay]

6. Cute story. Wicked cute, promise

From the Boston Herald story:

At the Berkshire Museum, Kerry said the Bush campaign brushed aside issues such as health care and the environment in 2004 by "day after day, beating the terrorism drum." Arching his eyebrows and his tone turning sarcastic, he later asked, "You see any of those color (terrorism) alerts since the election?"

Well, except for the recent false alarm in Washington, not many.

Kerry also forecast that the GOP Congress will "slam dunk" Bush's tax cuts to permanent status. "They vote so monolithic," Kerry said.

So the man from Massachusetts who might have been president is back home, mending political fences, treading some old paths. But last Thursday, he had a new traveling companion: a 5-month-old schnauzer whom Kerry, dog-sitting for the day, held in his lap as he was driven from stop to stop.

And there was something endearing about the almost-leader of the free world standing on the curb by a Berkshires ice cream store, eating a frozen treat and cradling that puppy as protectively as some military aide might have held the fabled nuclear-code football if Kerry, not Bush, were in the White House now.

[whometense]

7. That really is cute.

I wonder whose puppy it is? Teresa's??

[LeftyLizzie]

8. No, it's not Teresa's

I think I read somewhere that she and John have a German shepherd.