Totally Tracey Online
Wednesday, January 27, 2010
Busy week
UPDATE (Jan. 28): Not only will Tracey be on the Rachel Maddow program this evening, she'll also be on Bravo's Watch What Happens: Live. For writeups on all of her talk show appearances this year, go to the 2010 page on my site.
It certainly has been a busy week for Tracey. It started with her appearance on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon last Friday night, the first time she's ever appeared on his program. Then there was Live with Regis & Kelly on Monday morning, although Regis was still out recuperating from his hip surgery (Mark Consuelos was sitting in). There was State of the Union premiering Monday night (more on that in a moment). Then on Tuesday, Tracey appeared on Joy Behar's program on Headline News (they're calling themselves HLN officially these days); that was an appearance I didn't know about until the last minute. And now there's word that she'll be appearing on Rachel Maddow's program on MSNBC this Thursday (Jan. 28). How will Rachel react to Tracey's impression of her, which we saw Monday night? Might we get to see Dueling Rachels at some point? I wouldn't mind seeing Dueling Ariannas.... Anyway, I've written up summaries for the first two shows so far and will get to the others shortly.
Well, State of the Union had its season premiere Monday night. In many ways, the subject matter and the humor/satire were the same as in previous seasons. One big difference this year is that Tracey herself is directing the episodes. One wonders if Tracey the director ever has problems with Tracey the performer on the set... Back to the premiere: it contained the first instance during the series where I started laughing so hard, I started to cough. It involved the work done at a factory to distress jeans so that the wearer will look like he or she has done some significant labor, when in reality they haven't. One item in particular cracked me up, and I'll say no more about it here. Bernie Madoff (played in a cameo by Tracey's husband Allan) got it in three segments; I may never think of "Bloomberg minute" in the same way again. And there was a marvelous and intricate segment in an MSNBC makeup room where she was portraying five characters: Rachel Maddow, Arianna Huffington, Meghan McCain, Barney Frank, and Christiane Amanpour. With all that interaction between the characters, it reminded me of the Tracey Takes On... sketches and episodes where her characters would interact with each other; those were always among my favorites. Coming up on next week's episode: the return of Padma Perkesh.
It certainly has been a busy week for Tracey. It started with her appearance on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon last Friday night, the first time she's ever appeared on his program. Then there was Live with Regis & Kelly on Monday morning, although Regis was still out recuperating from his hip surgery (Mark Consuelos was sitting in). There was State of the Union premiering Monday night (more on that in a moment). Then on Tuesday, Tracey appeared on Joy Behar's program on Headline News (they're calling themselves HLN officially these days); that was an appearance I didn't know about until the last minute. And now there's word that she'll be appearing on Rachel Maddow's program on MSNBC this Thursday (Jan. 28). How will Rachel react to Tracey's impression of her, which we saw Monday night? Might we get to see Dueling Rachels at some point? I wouldn't mind seeing Dueling Ariannas.... Anyway, I've written up summaries for the first two shows so far and will get to the others shortly.
Well, State of the Union had its season premiere Monday night. In many ways, the subject matter and the humor/satire were the same as in previous seasons. One big difference this year is that Tracey herself is directing the episodes. One wonders if Tracey the director ever has problems with Tracey the performer on the set... Back to the premiere: it contained the first instance during the series where I started laughing so hard, I started to cough. It involved the work done at a factory to distress jeans so that the wearer will look like he or she has done some significant labor, when in reality they haven't. One item in particular cracked me up, and I'll say no more about it here. Bernie Madoff (played in a cameo by Tracey's husband Allan) got it in three segments; I may never think of "Bloomberg minute" in the same way again. And there was a marvelous and intricate segment in an MSNBC makeup room where she was portraying five characters: Rachel Maddow, Arianna Huffington, Meghan McCain, Barney Frank, and Christiane Amanpour. With all that interaction between the characters, it reminded me of the Tracey Takes On... sketches and episodes where her characters would interact with each other; those were always among my favorites. Coming up on next week's episode: the return of Padma Perkesh.
