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'Housewives': No Apologies, No Holds Barred

Kelliegrl — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 08:57:59 -0700

ABCNews.com: 'Housewives': No Apologies, No Holds Barred

'Housewives': No Apologies, No Holds Barred
Behind the Scenes of the Bravo Network's Unlikely Cult Hit
By SHARYN ALFONSI and MELINDA ARONS
June 8, 2009

The country may be suffering a recession, but there're no signs of it on one of Bravo's top reality shows.

Meet the "Real Housewives of New Jersey."

In the season premiere, housewife Teresa Giudice runs up a $120,000 furniture bill in a single store visit. She proceeds to pay with $100 bills.

"I hear the economy's crashing," Giudice says. "That's why I pay cash."

The real New Jersey housewives make no apologies for their big homes, big hair or big attitudes.

"You're either gonna love me or hate me," says Danielle Staub, another housewife. "There's no in between with me."

Watch the full story on "Nightline" tonight at 11:35 ET.

And that, the network believes, is precisely why the "Real Housewives" franchise is a cult hit.

"I think that people are fascinated by the idea of taste, and different peoples' taste, or lack of taste," says Andy Cohen, head of original programming at Bravo and overseer of the "Housewives" empire. "So it's always interesting to say, 'Wow, she spent that on that?!'"

The "Housewives" franchise now has spinoff programs located in Orange County, Calif., New York, Atlanta and, of course, New Jersey. Each site has its own characters and feel, with one big thing in common: The women have money, and a flair for spending it.

The housewives of Orange County love their pinot grigio and fake tans. Almost all of the Atlanta women are current or former wives of professional sports stars.

The New York show gets inside the lives of the city's elite social climbers. And now there's the New Jersey version, which might as well be called "The Real Housewives of the Sopranos."

Cohen recently gave "Nightline" an inside look at the Bravo reality-show factory. Contrary to what one might think, the "Real Housewives" franchise attracts some of the wealthiest and most educated viewers of any show, on any network.

"We don't talk down to our audience," Cohen says. "We have TV about rich people, and it's compelling."

For last season's Orange County "Housewives," viewership was up 45 percent. New York was up 62 percent. And the New Jersey premiere brought in a record 1.7 million households.

"I think people start watching, sometimes, the 'Real Housewives' and they think, 'Oh, my God, this is a train wreck. And that's why I'm watching.' But nine times out of 10, they actually start relating to a few of the women," Cohen says. "We may not have the same amount of money in our bank accounts, but these woman -- that is kind of like me."

'Real Housewives': Plenty of Battles
"Relatable" may not be the first word that comes to mind when one meets the "Housewives." "Nightline" recently hung out with the newest cast at a New Jersey diner, where they were posing for a People magazine shoot.

"If you think I'm a b*tch," New Jersey housewife Dina Manzo says, "bring it on!"

Manzo and her sister Caroline, who are married to brothers, are the core characters of the New Jersey show.

"Let me tell you something," Caroline Manzo says. "Me and my family are thick as thieves."

Meaning that the comparisons some bloggers and online commenters have made between Manzo and Carmela Soprano, the matriarch of "The Sopranos," are valid?

"I am Carmela Soprano in one respect," Manzo says. "I would make a cannoli pie for my child. ... I say I'm June Cleaver and Sharon Osbourne. If you shook 'em up, that's what you'd get at the end of the day. I am a modern-day mother with values of yesterday. You have to pick and choose your battles."

There are plenty battles on "Real Housewives." Take the dust-up between New York housewives Bethenny Frankel and Kelly Bensimon on their respective social statuses.

"You're here," Bensimon says, holding her hand low. Then the hand comes up. "I'm here."

Cohen reels at the exchange. "Who's gonna write that?" he says. "It's incredible. When I heard from the producers, 'This has happened,' I just couldn't believe it -- love it. It's like crack cocaine that has no side effects, it's perfectly legal and you can do it again and again."

The fight is a good example of how the show has pervaded popular culture. Frankel's and Bensimon's rivalry has been covered as an ongoing feud in the New York tabloids. It has inspired cartoons on YouTube and has fans proclaiming they're on "Team Bethenny."

But was the "catfight" real?

"The calamity was an eight-minute unedited scene, it was completely real and everything that was on the show was real," Frankel says. "And I think that that really, really got people so crazy, and projected such a visceral reaction, because everybody was in high school. And they all know there was a person who really, really thought that they were up here, and everyone else was down here. And, so, everybody gets back to their high school cafeteria. ... And most people were nerds. And most people weren't the cool person, and I think it drove people crazy and people wanted to jump into the TV set."

'Real Housewives': Sociology of the Affluent
In what has become a tradition after each season ends, Cohen "refereed" a reunion of the feuding New Jersey housewives. It lasted six exhausting hours.

"I threw out a grenade, let it go, and said, 'OK, ladies,'" Cohen says. "And it exploded multiple times. I had shrapnel. I went home, drank a bottle of wine and watched "Schindler's List" to relax."

But why would anyone want to watch hours of bickering, back-stabbing and social climbing?

"I love sociology," Cohen says. "I love the way people relate to each other. This is a study in affluent human interplay, and the manners and etiquette and social mores of a certain set of people. If anyone feels guilty watching, that's a way to justify it. It is sociology of the affluent."

Cohen makes no apologies for the conspicuous, often-crass spending habits the women display, even as the rest of the country reels from an economic meltdown.

"Look," he says, "we're putting it out there to reflect a certain slice of life in certain cities. It is for you to decide whether this is fun, offensive, hilarious, aspirational or what. We leave it to you. There's no judgment. We love our housewives, I love them. They're all our children. I love them. ... All my crazy little girls."

The producers have learned how to take that "crazy" nouveau-riche behavior and turn it into reality TV gold.

"We call it kind of the Bravo wink," Cohen says. "It's a cutaway, it's a reaction to what someone's saying. ... It's maybe someone saying something and then you see them doing something maybe a little different from what they're saying. But it's a definite editorial point of view that also makes it OK to watch the show, because we're all in on it together."

Like when New Jersey housewife Giudice proclaims she's not a stage mom, and a second later puts makeup on her young daughter.

But the housewives may be getting the last laugh. Many aren't housewives at all, but rather savvy businesswomen hoping to use the show as a launching platform for their careers.

Giudice is starting a line of hair products for kids. Staub, seen in one episode throwing a Botox party, plans to create an exercise video to explain how to get her youthful appearance.

The New York housewives have written books on manners and launched a skin care line.

Frankel chose to go on the show to expand her image as a celebrity chef. "Two years ago, I couldn't pay my rent," she says.

"I thought it was a 50-50 shot. It would be completely horrendous for me or the best thing that ever happened to me. And bravo to Bravo -- it's the best thing that ever happened to me."

Frankel now has a best-selling cookbook, "Naturally Thin," and a line of bakery products. She's about to launch her own line of low-calorie margaritas.

"I am on TV because I want to build a brand," she says, "and I want to speak to women and help them lose weight."

Unlike the other series in the "Housewives" franchise, the New Jersey housewives aren't just friends. Most of them are family. And they pride themselves on being real.

"We are just, we are who we are," Dina Manzo says. "We are not trying to be anybody we are not, we shoot from the hip, we are not ashamed. You know, I said I was sweating my balls off while I was playing tennis with my daughters. I mean, did I love that I said that?

"I'm like, 'No,' but I say it all the time."

A Locally Grown Diet With Fuss but No Muss

tdsollog — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 10:54:24 -0700

A Locally Grown Diet With Fuss but No Muss
By KIM SEVERSON, NY Times
Published: July 22, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/22/dining/22local.html?th&emc=th

Eating locally raised food is a growing trend. But who has time to get to the farmer’s market, let alone plant a garden?

That is where Trevor Paque comes in. For a fee, Mr. Paque, who lives in San Francisco, will build an organic garden in your backyard, weed it weekly and even harvest the bounty, gently placing a box of vegetables on the back porch when he leaves.

Call them the lazy locavores - city dwellers who insist on eating food grown close to home but have no inclination to get their hands dirty. Mr. Paque is typical of a new breed of business owner serving their needs.

Even couples planning a wedding at the Plaza Hotel in New York City can jump on the local food train. For as little as $72 a person, they can offer guests a “100-mile menu” of food from the caterer’s farm and neighboring fields in upstate New York.

“The highest form of luxury is now growing it yourself or paying other people to grow it for you,” said Corby Kummer, the food columnist and book author. “This has become fashion.”

Locally grown food, even fully cooked meals, can be delivered to your door. A share in a cow raised in a nearby field can be brought to you, ready for the freezer - a phenomenon dubbed cow pooling. There is pork pooling as well. At Sugar Mountain Farm in Vermont, the demand for a half or whole rare-breed pig is so great that people will not be seeing pork until the late fall.

Although a completely local diet is out of reach for even the most dedicated, the shift toward it is being driven by the increasingly popular view that fast food is the enemy and that local food tastes better. Depending on the season, local produce can cost an additional $1 a pound or more. But long-distance food, with its attendant petroleum consumption and cheap wages, is harming the planet and does nothing to help build communities, locavores believe.

As a result of interest in local food and rising grocery bills, backyard gardens have been enjoying a renaissance across the country, but what might be called the remote-control backyard garden - no planting, no weeding, no dirt under the fingernails - is a twist. “They want to have a garden, they don’t want to garden,” said the cookbook author Deborah Madison, who lives in Santa Fe, N.M.

Her neighbor Chase Ault, a business consultant, recently had a vegetable garden installed with a customized set of plants and a regular service agreement. “I am working 24-7 these days, but I wanted to have something growing in front of me,” Ms. Ault said.

Like organic food, which corporate manufacturers embraced in the 1990s, before it, local food is quickly moving into the mainstream. Last year, the New Oxford American Dictionary picked locavore as its word of the year. A National Restaurant Association survey this year of more than 1,200 chefs, many of whom work for chain restaurants or large food companies, found locally grown produce to be the second-hottest American food trend, just behind bite-size desserts.

For a growing number of diners, a food’s provenance is more important than its brand name, said Michelle Barry, who studies American eating patterns for the Hartman Group, a research firm in Bellevue, Wash. As a result, grocery stores are looking to repackage products like milk and cheese to play up any local angle.

That will be a boon to people who find that shortcuts are necessary if they wish to eat locally. “If you live on East 80th 14 floors up and all you have is a potted plant, it’s tough,” said Lynne Rossetto Kasper, the host of the radio show “The Splendid Table,” who recruited 15 listeners for a study on the subject. Researchers will record their struggles to make 80 percent of their meals from organic or local sources. Spices are the only exemption.

Lazy locavores would never go to such extremes. Rather, they might simply sign up with the FruitGuys. The company, which has offices in San Francisco and Philadelphia, will deliver boxes of local, sustainably raised or organic fruit right to the cubicle.

In the mood for a meal that reeks of community but does not necessitate a communal activity? Three Stone Hearth in Berkeley, Calif., which describes itself as a community supported kitchen, offers its customers the opportunity to make friends while making food from local, sustainable farms, but the worker-owned company also offers online shopping for people who do not have the time to pick up orders or participate in educational activities.

Customers 20 miles away in the affluent community of Mill Valley, for example, can pay $15 to have jars filled with Andalusian stew, made with pasture-raised pork, delivered to their door. The jars, of course, are returnable.

“It’s a very savvy crowd that understands how all the pieces of sustainable farming and nutrition fit together,” said Larry Wisch, one of five worker-owners at Three Stone Hearth. “But they don’t want the headaches of getting here.”

Or you could just have your private chef handle all your local food needs. At their Hamptons summer house, John and Lorna Brett Howard want to eat almost exclusively local, which means that in place of one trip to the grocery store, their chef, Michael Welch, makes several trips to farm stands and the fishmonger.

“What I’m seeing with my clients is not the trendiness or the politics,” Mr. Welch said. “They are looking only at taste.”

Mrs. Howard said she ate local vegetables growing up in northern Michigan and Chicago. But her husband, a private equity fund manager, ate a lot of expensive imported food with little thought about where it came from. But all that has changed.

“It’s like the first time you start drinking good red wine and you realize what you were drinking was so bad you can’t go back to it,” Mrs. Howard said. “It’s that same way with vegetables.”

The author Barbara Kingsolver, whose book “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle” was a best seller last year, did not have the lazy locavore in mind when she wrote about the implications of making her family spend a year eating local. But she celebrates the trend.

“As a person of rural origin who has lived much of my life in rural places,” she said, “I can’t tell you how joyful it makes me to hear that it’s trendy for people in Manhattan to own a part of a cow.”

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Books' Guide to Bargain Book Shopping

books and shoes — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 08:44:15 -0800

As you know I am an avid reader, and one thing I love to buy is books. Of course my budget is always limited and being the bargain shopper that I am, I will not spend outrageous amounts of money on books. If you are a hardcore reader like myself, then read on for my bargain book shopping secrets.

1. Friends of the Library - This is pretty much national so chances are some of your local libraries are participants. Google Friends of the Library and see what comes up near you. If you visit your county's library site, there is likely a link to Friends of the Library which will show you which branches participate and when FOL sales are held. I am fortunate enough to have an FOL Store nearby the office but most participating branches also have carts in the front of the library where you can also purchase books as well as seasonal or monthly sales.

The universal prices of my local FOL stores/carts are $.50 each or 3/$1 on mass market paperbacks, $1 for tradesize paperbacks, and $3 each or 2/$5 on hardcovers. On actual sale days, you can get better prices at 4 or 5/$1 for pbs or "a bag of books" for $5!! Insanely cheap books and a good cause! FOL is usually run by volunteers so all proceeds go to the library and the related community!

2. Thrift Stores - I personally happen to think that Goodwill's books are a tad overpriced. I think they now charge $1.50 a paperback and $3-5 for hardcover. While occasionally I might find my way into a Goodwill, I normally check out a different local thrift store. The one near me that I like is North Fulton Community Charities Thrift Store. Again, all books here have been donated and the establishment is run by volunteers. So all proceeds go back to the community. This particular charity assists needy families in our district with food and financial assistance. They happen to hold a nice, continuously revolving selection of books priced at $.75 for any size paperback and $1.50 for hardcover. Also, great prices and a worthy cause. If I have some spare change and need me a little pick-me-up, then I'll head over here or the FOL store.

3. Book Swaps - My favorite online book swap is PaperBackSwap.com. This is great because you are pretty much dealing with a community of avid book lovers like yourself. The swap basically works like this: You list used books to swap from your collection that you’ve either already read or no longer have a need for. When someone requests a book from you, you mail it to that member and receive a credit. You can then use that credit to request any book available in the system. The member that you requested the book from will then mail the book to you. Currently, there are over 1,675,000 available in the system. These are not just novels. This includes cookbooks, college textbooks, reference books, whatever. So not only are you receiving books that you want, you are helping others get books that they want. There are no fees to join, you only pay the shipping to send out books where others return the favor when sending a book to you. Plus members regularly hold sales on their shelf, such as 3 books for 1 credit. And there is also the option of being a “boxer” where you can exchange books with other boxers without the use of credits (if you send me these 3 books off your shelf, you can pick any 3 books you want off mine). If I’m ever looking for a particular book, PBS is the very first place I check.

4. Used Book Stores – With the help of Google, I just recently discovered a used book store in my area and ran over on my lunch hour. The selection in this place was tremendous!! I was like a kid in a candy store (with no money but I will be back)! The way this particular store worked was like this: All paperbacks are half of the cover price. Tradesize pbs and hardcovers have prices sketched in the front but typically run at about 30% of the cover price. So if you are looking for a specific book (I found one immediately that I must have), this is the place to go because you’ll pay 50% off the cover. With the FOL or thrift store, it’s more of a browse and see what’s good. If you are looking to purchase a book as a gift, this is also a good place to check because prices are decent and the condition of the books is excellent! Plus as I said, the selection is much more extensive so it is much more likely you’ll find it here. Another huge plus: there is a credit exchange policy. When you bring in books to exchange, they give you a credit for 50% of the cover price. This credit actually goes toward the cover price of another book. So basically I bring in two paperbacks with a cover of $7.99, and I get to take any paperback of my choosing that is $7.99. That is what I am talking about!! So you better believe I will be back with two already read books of mine to get that book I have to have!

5. The Internet – If am looking for a particular book, the Internet is great. Amazon, Ebay and Half.com are probably my top 3 book shopping sites. While I love to browse the other stores, you can’t beat the Internet for quick comparison shopping. I also find that the Internet is usually where you can find the best discounts on NEW media. Perfect for gift shopping.

6. Book Stores – While I don’t make a lot of purchases from Barnes & Noble, I still love the store. Something about the smell of new books makes me happy. I have found some bargains here but you’ve got to look for them. Many times I will see the same exact book in the “Bargain Books” that is on the shelf. It’s just overstock, I suppose, or maybe an earlier edition. The best place to look in these stores is the “Last Chance” rack. These are usually an EXTRA 50% off the marked down price because there’s only one or two books left. I’ve found wonderful, new hardcover books for $2!!

HAPPY READING!!