Today’s Busy Working Woman

David Letterman

   David Letterman, bless his heart, was on one occasion discussing Shirley McLaine and her outlandish notions about reincarnation. He wondered aloud why it was that everyone seemed to have been some sort of Big Shot in their “recalled previous lifetimes.” “How come,” he asked, “no one ever remembers having been a dishwasher in El Paso in 1910?” On another occasion, on the same subject, Letterman claimed to recall having delivered a pizza to President Eisenhower in a previous lifetime.

   It is in this same spirit that one might well wonder how it is that the mythical creature of our popular culture known as “Today’s Busy Working Woman” is somehow never seen as a member of the working class, like perhaps an assembly line worker at an automotive stamping plant. Outside Roseanne Barr sit-coms, she is rarely depicted, say, as an overweight housekeeper at the Red Roof Inn. And certainly she is never portrayed in commercials as … oh, a Wal-Mart “associate” with bad teeth.

   Rather, she is always a sort of no-nonsense beauty — a crisp, efficient “professional” (we’re never quite sure just what her profession is, exactly) who wears tailored business suits and hangs out in sleek offices with lots of glass and hi-tech telephones, evidently spending most of her “work” day giving presentations, looking at drawings, and talking to other “professionals” about those drawings over lunch at expensive restaurants.