‘While I am a first lady, I view myself as being the average woman’ Michelle Obama On Pop Culture

The ever glamorous US First Lady, Michelle Obama, who is the stunning cover for the latest edition of Variety Magazine, has just updated us about her life as the first lady.

 

In an interview with Variety magazine, the proud mother of two adorable girls recognizes that she’s “a product of pop culture.”

When she was 10, she tells Variety, The Mary Tyler Moore Show made her realize that a single woman could prize her career and not need a husband at the end of the tunnel.

Today, she says, she fervently believes in the power of pop culture to show people lives they might not have considered before — or to validate the lives they’re already living.

Mrs Obama says she isn’t afraid to use her influence to reach a wider audience and spread the word about her signature issues, like helping military families, promoting girls’ education, healthy eating and exercising.

Read the excerpts from her cover story…

Despite being First Lady, she views herself as an average woman who’s in tune with pop culture.

“I view myself as being the average woman,” she says.

“While I am first lady, I wasn’t first lady my whole life. I’m a product of pop culture. I’m a consumer of pop culture, and I know what resonates with people. I know what they’ll get a chuckle out of and what they think is kind of silly. And whenever my team approaches me with ideas and concepts, we’re usually like, ‘Is this really funny? Are people going to understand it?’”

When she’s being silly and making people laugh, she also has a message behind it.

“What I have never been afraid of is to be a little silly, and you can engage people that way,” Obama says in an interview with Variety in her upstairs White House office.

“My view is, first you get them to laugh, then you get them to listen. So I’m always game for a good joke, and I’m not so formal in this role. There’s very little that we can’t do that people wouldn’t appreciate.”

While she doesn’t have a budget, she still gets the job done.

“It has been wonderful having the platform of the first lady’s office. But if you sort of look at who we are, we don’t have a budget. We don’t have congressional authority.

”But I still believe we managed to have impact on these issues, which sort of sets the foundation to think, ‘Gosh, we can do a lot, even when we’re not here, just with the power of public awareness.’ ”

FLOTUS loves entertainment, but feels it’s crucial to add diversity in Hollywood.

“For so many people, television and movies may be the only way they understand people who aren’t like them,” she says.

“And when I come across many little black girls who come up to me over the course of this 7½ years with tears in their eyes, and they say: ‘Thank you for being a role model for me. I don’t see educated black women on TV, and the fact that you’re first lady validates who I am….’

“My mom says it all the time: ‘People are so enamored of Michelle and Barack Obama.’ And she says, ‘There are millions of Michelle and Barack Obamas.’ We’re not new. We’re not special.

”People who come from intact families who are educated, who have values, who care for their kids, who raise their kids — if you don’t see that on TV, and you don’t live in communities with people like me, you never know who we are, and you can make and be susceptible to all sorts of assumptions and stereotypes and biases, based on nothing but what you see and hear on TV. So it becomes very important for the world to see different images of each other, so that, again, we can develop empathy and understanding.”

Photo credit: Variety Mag