T A B L E_.T A L K

If you're a habitual PBS listener, check out the This American Life Chat Board live and cooking in Table Talk

THE ANTI-MARTHAS | PAGE 1, 2
- - - - - - - - - -

Color lives on, though, in Discovery's biggest hit, the proudly swishy rising gay icon Christopher Lowell, whose "Interior Matters" is half design class and half counseling session. TV writers have naturally compared the costume-wearing interior decorator to Richard Simmons -- the adjectives "flamboyant" and "glitzy" come up a lot -- but the comparison is most true because of his studio audience, which, like Simmons' followers, are a motley group of slightly schlumpy, style-challenged average folks whom he sweetly flatters and cheers like a recovery-group leader. On one episode he pulls a matronly woman out of his studio audience to do her makeup, by way of illustrating the importance of foundations. He tells her, "The walls" -- like your body -- "are your background canvas." And if your, ah, canvas is less than perfect, goes Lowell's message, you can still faux it up to your advantage.

It's not hard to see the connection between this and the daytime-TV cult of the "make over" (a term Lowell applies to many of his decorating jobs), and the whole daytime language of self-esteem. Lowell gives us home decoration as therapy, the window treatment as counseling treatment. Where Stewart's catch phrase is the universalist "It's a good thing," Lowell has "You can do it!" and the poignant "Where there is fear, there is no creativity." Lowell and his guests talk a lot about "expressing yourself" through, say, faux finish; above all, he talks about "fear," a favorite word, until the show seems to be a thinly veiled -- though incredibly cheerful -- personal psychodrama. (The very title, "Interior Motives," seems loaded in this light.) On Lowell's show, you're not just working over your living room -- you're working out your life issues: "Don't make any judgments about the decision you've made until you've covered the whole wall. ... Have the courage. Dare to get into the painting and the color!" You want to hug the guy.

It's a message that's especially strong coming from somebody with nontraditional sexual persona: It's shelter for the Other. (Indeed, during the day -- despite its nighttime Hungry Man dinner of bombers and animal snuff films -- Discovery is one of the more gender-subversive things on television, with enough men hanging bunting and no-nonsense butch women wielding power tools to fill a special issue of National Liberty Journal.) Lowell calls himself a "Band-Aid" for those intimidated by Martha -- people with less money, less East Coast starch, less confidence. He sells decoration not as a job of following directions but as, essentially, Outsider Art. He does for curtain hanging what Madonna did for a gay-club dance craze in "Vogue": makes it a statement of confidence and defiance. They say you're a freak! They say you're too poor! Well, beauty's where you find it! Now get up on that dance floor!

What's most impressive is how warmly his far-more-conventional audience has embraced him, another example of the secret alliance between Wal-Mart and Wigstock that pervades daytime television in the Gay Best Friend Era of pop culture -- at least until hubby comes home and the 6 p.m. news restores order. (Delighted with Lowell's success, Discovery is launching "The Christopher Lowell Show" in the fall, which a network rep says will involve longer projects and "less immediate gratification" -- and, alas, no studio audience.) Corny as it may sound, this daytime audience knows from outsiderdom, at least as regards the tapioca-chomping, thread-counting urban style elite. Much has been made of the disconnect between the do-it-yourself craze and the economic boom (big sweeping finish coming! stay with me, folks!), but for this audience, booms are, if not illusory, then not guaranteed. The decade began with a promise of expendability for folks of every shade of collar, and it takes more than a couple of sunny 401(k) statements to forget that. To brighten up that inevitable rainy day, we know, we'd better be ready to reach for the food coloring and the dried kidney beans -- and great big economy-size boxes of baking soda.
SALON | March 9, 1999

James Poniewozik's Under the Covers column appears every Tuesday in Media.