When I really think about it, there are a lot of things I don’t like about Mariah Carey. Aside from her sickeningly successful career (175 million albums sold worldwide) there was THAT episode of Cribs, her weird marriage to Nick Cannon and her current role in Oprah-Winfrey-brings-Color-Purple-into-the-21st-century biopic Precious. So it was with some surprise this week that I found Mariah Carey making me miss home.
Having no personal issue with raping, pillaging or murder, I sat down to Thanksgiving dinner last week to show my appreciation to the Lord for allowing those bloodthirsty Pilgrims to survive their first winter in the New World. It was a riotous affair of Don Pérignon, turkey and pecan pie, made all the more exciting by the half English/half Hebrew dinner conversation that became more fraught as the night wore on. The evening was rounded off with a Good Morning America Exclusive- “Rihanna Breaks Her Silence”, a surprisingly boring Diane Sawyer interview in which the serious message about domestic violence was lost on me as I tried to take Rihanna’s Barbados accent seriously. This was made all the more impossible by her poignant advice to young fans at the show’s end- “F Love”- an attitude that Im sure would have been worth its salt in the harsh environment of a 17th century New England winter. Yes Rihanna, the Pilgrims would have been proud.
Whether for effect or just carelessness I had forgotten to mention that there are two things I really like about Mariah Carey. Her movie Glitter and her popular 1994 Christmas hit All I Want For Christmas Is You (according to The New Yorker, “one of the few worthy additions to the holiday canon”). It was the latter that made me miss home when, as is my tradition, I played it at max volume on December 1st. Whilst I may have spent most of Thanksgiving in Elaine’s erratically driven car desperately searching for Video Phone on Beyoncé radio I did enjoy some time with her family and for the briefest moment, pined for home comforts. Needless to say, it was a feeling quickly dispelled by a night out in the Castro, a terrible hangover and the purchasing of an imitation rooster in San Francisco’s Chinatown.
