What’s striking about Tina Fey, our 2009 Person of the Year, is not only that she’s a brilliant wit and fabulous writer and performer, but that with all her success and time in the spotlight, at heart she’s still a Greek girl from Philly who keeps in touch with her roots (replies to e-mails from the high school math teacher who put her to sleep) and talks with fondness about the fetes her mother hosted which featured lots of Entenmann’s products, and she might want to settle down in Florida one day and open up a craft shop.
Her husband says it best when he told Vanity Fair:
“…she has her principles and she sticks to her principles more than anybody I’ve ever met in my life.” Tina is not swayed by celebrity or the spotlight, which is glaring on her right now after her rollicking year impersonating Sarah Palin and winning seven Emmys for her sitcom 30 Rock. She would rather don old clothes and hunker over her laptop to write or spend time in the playground with her daughter and husband and then have a day out scarfing fries and burgers.
She is not a diva, though she is a star, she remains Elizabeth Stamatina Fey from Upper Darby, Pennsylvania, who graduated to the big leagues, but is still Stamatina Fey at heart and doesn’t forget it. And who also happens to have the wit to skewer the muckety-mucks and remind them how they got there and how it doesn’t buy them immunity from the hard-headed girls with the big glasses and even bigger sweaters who populated high school on the fringes and were sometimes forgotten but took everything in and are a built-in BS meter for the world.
Tina Fey didn’t skewer Sarah Palin just because she looks uncannily like Sarah Palin—she skewered her because she is Tina Fey from Upper Darby and doesn’t forget it though she lives in New York City and is now a star. And Sarah Palin had the misfortune to forget she will always be Sarah Palin from Wasilla, Alaska and not just the diva of a moribund Republican Party.
Tina Fey had the wisdom to set her straight and also put us all on guard against our own foolishness and petty vanities.
Dimitri C. Michalakis
