Making politics palatable
I’ve been asked more than once whether I’d make a chocolate cupcake for President Obama because he is the first black president. Actually, most people who ask that say African-American president. However, considering that I have a website that explores the way that we use food language to describe women, I wasn’t too keen on […]
As I’ve gotten closer, and closer to the present, it has become more of a challenge to figure out how to approach these cupcakes. This is more true for the last two presidents. In the preface to the book The Faiths of the Postwar Presidents, David Holmes says, “No president’s story is complete until his […]
One of the things that the media loved to talk about during Bill Clinton’s presidency was his diet and his weight. When I was thinking about this cupcake, this came to mind. But, sometimes we misremember things. A few cursory searches, though, proved to me that I wasn’t making this up at all. Don’t […]
Recently, I was at my son’s pediatrician, George H. W. Bush came up. I was trying to distract my son from the immunizations he was getting, so I started spouting off presidential trivia. As a part of this, I told him that George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush were our nation’s second […]
Ronald Reagan is really the first president that I remember from when he was the President of the United States. I think that the incident that even really made me aware of the presidency at all was the Iran Contra Affair and the news that was playing all of the time during that period. […]
Jimmy Carter is one of the presidents that comes up when I talk to strangers about this strange Head of State Cakes projects. Everyone bets that the Jimmy Carter cupcake features peanuts or peanut butter. Jimmy Carter means more to me than having been a peanut farmer. Jimmy Carter is the first president during whose […]
Even before I became profoundly interested in the United States presidents, Gerald Ford stood out to me for one reason and one reason alone. He was from my home state, Michigan. As I learned more about President Ford, it struck me how much “midwestern” was used to describe him, at least in the places where […]
When you embark upon a project about the presidents, there are certain presidents that people ask you about. No one is as interested in how you’re going to interpret, say, Millard Fillmore as they are in how you’re going to interpret someone like Tricky Dick. Nixon even inspired suggestions. Someone wanted to know if I […]
Lyndon Johnson is my longstanding presidential crush (not to be mistaken for who I see as the most handsome of the presidents.) Sometimes I blame this obsession on a cold. I was home from work convalescing on the couch and I decided to watch LBJ American Experience. As I drifted into and out of shallow […]
Everybody has something trite to say about our 35th President, John F. Kennedy. My trite thing to say about JFK is that an unexpected death can do wonders for one’s image. I told you it was trite. JFK, though, was a master of image. He understood the power of a good story, the power of […]