Word: hostessing
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With the widower Jefferson setting such an unpropitious social tone, the wife of his Secretary of State established an alternate "court" that she presided over for close to a half-century. Dolley Madison was the first to assume the role of what came to be dubbed "the Washington hostess," and she provided the model for the rest to follow. Dolley's dinners--used at first to promote her husband's career and then to solidify her own--delighted the politicians, and she made every guest feel like the most important person there. Living well into the middle of the 19th...
Twentieth century Washington hostesses wielded such political power that they achieved wider public acclaim. Perle Mesta, known as "the hostess with the mostest," became Harry Truman's ambassador to Luxembourg, the inspiration for the Irving Berlin musical Call Me Madam and the subject of a 1949 cover story in this magazine. Bill Clinton posted Pamela Harriman as his ambassador to France. It was the least the President could do for a woman who used her talent for entertaining, and her husband's money, to bring fractious Democrats together in the 1980s, eventually uniting them behind the young Governor of Arkansas...
...Moving around the exhibit hall, my picture is snapped with a cell phone. Suddenly, I appear in the middle of a 15th century Venetian ballroom scene on a computer, with a mask over my image. Valentina, an artificial intelligence hostess, greets me and invites me to Venice Chronicles' party. An actor working from the website's office directs the fantasy by giving orders, moving our images and forcing us to make conversation with each other...
...their lack of bile, their can-do optimism stand in refreshing contrast to politics as it is practiced in our nation's capital. One night last autumn, Schweitzer took me to Jake's Restaurant in Billings, one of the better steak houses in his state. "Oh, hi, Governor," the hostess beamed. Schweitzer asked her if she had a table available. She frowned over her reservation list. "Sorry, Governor, we're full up," she said. "You want...
...their lack of bile, their can-do optimism stand in refreshing contrast to politics as it is practiced in our nation's capital. One night last autumn, Schweitzer took me to Jake's Restaurant in Billings, one of the better steak houses in his state. "Oh, hi, Governor," the hostess beamed. Schweitzer asked her if she had a table available. She frowned over her reservation list. "Sorry, Governor, we're full up," she said. "You want...