Posted on

How Michelle Obama Rendered Two Powerful Men Invisible

A few weeks ago, the Prime Minister of China, Mr. Hu Jintao, visited his counterpart President Barack Obama of the United States. China is a $5 trillion industrial elephant and boasts of the fastest growing military force in the world. The US is the last SuperMan standing. So it’s fair to say that President Obama and Prime Minister Jantao are perhaps the world’s two most powerful men at the time of writing this post.

Anyway, that is the not point of this article. The focus of this article is the state dinner that was held in the honor of Mr. Jantao. And again, this article is not about the Chef or the menu. It’s about Michelle Obama.

As I watched the pictures that came out of the dinner, I was surprised by how one woman’s dress could render the two most powerful men on planet almost invisible. Looking at the picture below, the only person I see is Michelle Obama, with everybody else desperately struggling for space to appear in the photograph. Or is it just me?

I don’t know what the folks from the fashion cognoscenti will say about it, but I kind of like the color and asymmetrical neckline.

And why did I digress from malaria, a disease that kills a child every 30-45 seconds, and HIV, which affects over 22 million in Sub-Saharan Africa, to write on Mrs. Obama’s dress, you may ask? In fact, I am asking the same question. I just couldn’t resist writing down what I observed as I watched the pictures.

How does one woman subject the world’s most powerful duo to a virtual invisibility or non-existence?

Thanks for reading.

Share
Posted on

So what’s up with this one shoulder thing?

First of all let me say that I’m not a journalist. I’m a chemist. What I do here is called blogging. Blogging gives me more latitude to cover whatever crosses my mind hoping somebody will read them.
For the past few weeks, I have been writing heavily on malaria, Robert and Grace Mugabe, poverty in Africa and the responsibilities of developed nations towards Africa.
I would like to digress today. I’ll attempt to talk about fashion.
As we say, ladies first. I’ve being observing this one shoulder bandwagon for a while. As a disclaimer, let me say that I find them cool, cute, and flirty- all at the same time (in fact, most of the time). I always thought this one shoulder thing was an American trend until I visited Ghana in March/April this year. I was there for a few weeks but I had the opportunity to attend a funeral one Saturday. By the way, if you’re uniformed, Saturday’s are for funeral in Ghana, unless you’re an Adventist.
one shoulder
]It was at this funeral that I realized how mistaken I was. As a scientist, I hate to give unsubstantiated percentages unless I have the figures to calculate them. However, from my ‘guesstimation’, l can say that half of the women I saw at the funeral were one-shoulder moms. So it wasn’t an American thing, after all. Another surprising observation I made was that, this one-shoulder phenomenon is no respecter of age. I could easily spot one shoulders among teens, twenty somethings, thirty somethings, all the way into the seventy somethings.
“Ok so this one-shoulder trend is a global phenomenon”. I accepted with some childlike guilt.
One shoulder stuff 2
And those women 5000 miles away even know how to make it extra youthful and classy than their western counterparts. I never knew you could combine a one-shoulder dress and a head scarf and blow it up with a bold belt. What a new twist. I saw it live and they looked kind of neat. What they probably need is some tight strapless bras to go with their one shoulders, and they’ll surely be unstoppable.

If air tickets down a little bit, I”ll repeat my adventure next spring. I’ll report back what I see. No shoulders? You bet. Perhaps, it no new thing over there.

Share