It is as unfair to Margaret Trudeau as it is inevitable to frame her as the wife of one Canadian prime minister and the mother of another. But, look, I’m just going to start out by telling you that the current Prime Minister’s mom led an audience at Chicago’s The Second City in chanting “FUCK YOU!” on Thursday night, and it was entirely charming and everyone there seemed to thoroughly enjoy themselves and feel that this was something they all really needed.
Trudeau spent much of her early adult life gobbled up by the press and the public at large—married to Pierre Trudeau, so young, so beautiful, so glamorous and so obviously on the edge of shatter, more infamous than famous, possessed of an untamable wildness that she would only realize years later was undiagnosed bi-polar disorder. Trudeau’s animating cause now is mental health, and her show is wrapped intimately around that issue.
Trudeau’s beauty is nearly its own character in this show, but lest that sound distasteful, it comes across as both winsome and razor-sharp: Yep, I was stunning, and the world treated that as a natural resource to be strip-mined, but now it’s mine and I’m going to have some fun with it.
She was made an “accidental feminist,” she said, by virtue of moments like attending a dinner at the White House when, with her marriage disintegrating beneath her feet, she chose a dress she thought would lift her spirits, only to learn from the next day’s newspapers that she had insulted Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter with her too-short hem.
In an interview with the Chicago Tribune before the show opened, Trudeau said all her children had been very supportive of this venture. “My honesty about mental illness has helped open a door for real conversation, and I think Justin wants to continue that conversation,” she said. “He has put no restrictions on me. His father couldn’t. Why should he try?”
And in the category of don’t believe everything you see in a photo, “I didn’t even like Mick Jagger,” Trudeau said. “He was an arrogant ass.” That made it all the more arresting to watch the mother from whom he inherited those qualities be goofy and earnest and antic and utterly exposed and have a crowd lapping it up. After the show, when much of the audience had left the theatre, Trudeau emerged to mingle with those who remained.
boring and stupid
With all the new seeming empathy & understanding about mental illness & those dealing with it, Margaret Trudeau should be treated like a national treasure, regardless of political affiliation. But I'd have to be crazy to expect that.
A snowflake performance
Muggy is one crazy lady. No one talks about how Justin’s dad hit her. Her many affairs and her drilling use.
feh! any truck driver can say F You... classless and the audience laughs because F you is so funny.. I remember giggling at those 2 words when I first heard them at the age of 6 or 7.