Real housewives dish on desperate
Say truth is even stranger than series
By MICHELE INGRASSIA
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER
Her body, clad in pink velour sweats, is as tiny and taut as Sarah
Jessica Parker's. Her hair is as sleek as the black marble lining
the mall. Her diamond ring is as big as a cube floating in a
Starbucks iced caramel macchiato, which happens to be the
beverage of choice on a midweek morning in suburbia.
Indeed, walking through the gleaming Walt Whitman Mall in Huntington,
L.I., the other day, Beth, a 38-year-old mother of two from upscale
Woodbury, looked like she'd just stepped off Wysteria Lane, the
setting of ABC's "Desperate Housewives" - dressed down,
revved up, trying to squeeze in a few errands before the kids come
home from preschool.
And no wonder. Out in the land of pool boys and manicured lawns,
the new Sunday night show is a hit, especially among the stay-at-home
set, which is slicing and dicing "Desperate" moms as
fervently as singletons once dissected "Sex and the City."
"Everybody thinks that everyone else is living the white
picket fence life out here," says Beth, who, like most women
interviewed, didn't want her full name used. "But there are
secrets going on all the time.
"The show takes things to an extreme, but that's what's so
funny - we see ourselves in them and the thoughts that run through
their minds. But would we act on it?"
All across suburbia, housewives - and their beleaguered nannies,
housekeepers and gardeners - agree that there's more than a little
truth in the show's characters: Susan (Teri Hatcher), the divorced
mom; Bree (Marcia Cross), the Stepford wife; Gabrielle (Eva Longoria),
the va-va-voom ex-model making it with the garden boy; Lynette
(Felicity Huffman), the ex-career woman so overwhelmed by her three
bad boys that she leaves them on a street corner; and Edie (Nicolette
Sheridan), the sexpot who wants to get in every guy's pants.
"Of course I know women like her," Kari, a 37-year-old mom,
says as she pauses to chat at Wheatley Plaza in Greenvale, L.I., near
her Roslyn home.
"There are more women having affairs in this town than men. I
know one woman who had an affair with her landscaper, married him
and had his baby. I know another who's doing it with her yoga teacher."
The head of a Greenwich, Conn., domestics agency tosses in her dish
about a woman who dumped her husband for the guy in charge of their
stables.
Margot, a 49-year-old gallery assistant from Greenwich, knows the
bed-hopping game too well.
"My husband left for work, and I had the whole day ahead of
me," she says. "So I filled my time with my personal
trainer, tennis coach, good-looking carpenter."
After 15 years, she says, it got old - "but for me at least,
‘Desperate Housewives' isn't all fiction."
And it's not just the sex-in-the-suburbs theme that's striking a
chord. Unlike urbanites, whose apartments offer anonymity, suburban
women have to fend off neighborhood busybodies.
"I have the nosy neighbor who tells me that my air-conditioner
is rattling, who tells me that there's a strange man in the backyard,
even though it's my father-in-law, who brings me tomatoes - but
first peers into my windows," says Lisa, a 37-year-old from
Plainview, Conn. And who doesn't know at least one Mrs. Perfect,
the frantic, frenetic suburban mom who makes Martha Stewart look
like a slacker?
"We have friends whose houses are perfect," says Susan
Famulari, a 37-year-old mother from East Northport, L.I. "And
if you go to a candle party, they show up with a dessert that
looks like they spent three days putting it together. We just
laugh."
It's not that the suburbs are particularly hilarious. But 60 years
after the birth of Levittown, L.I., experts say, Americans are still
conflicted about the merits of the city vs. the burbs, and shows
like "Desperate" play to that ambivalence.
"There is something about suburbia that always gives us that
‘Twin Peaks' thing: Beneath the surface of this suburban ideal
lurks this dark, ugly, lurid perversity. That will always be
fertile ground for a soap opera," says sociologist Donna
Gaines, whose book "Teenage Wasteland" examined the
desperation of suburban teens.
The appeal, she adds, is the same as that of "Knots Landing,"
"Dynasty" and all the other nighttime soaps of the 1970s
and ‘80s: isolation, alienation, conformity, materialism, repression
and bad taste - "all the things that make for great drama."
Longoria says the show's appeal is even simpler: "We were
long overdue for a show on the modern housewife," she told
the Daily News. "The last one we saw was June Cleaver
[on "Leave It to Beaver"]. This show liberates women
the same way ‘Sex and the City' liberated single women."
Well, maybe not. Real women seem to see the tyranny of toddlerhood
in the Huffman character - the woman who gave up her career for
four rambunctious children.
"In the first episode, some one from her old firm stops her
in the supermarket and said, ‘Gee, you could be running the
company,'" says Debbie Molloy, a mother of two from Kings
Park, L.I. "I really got a kick out of that.
"Many of us are college-educated and know the opportunity
to stay home with our kids is great. But there are times when my
husband comes home and I tell him, ‘Okay, I'm going to get a
part-time job now.'"
Walking through Walt Whitman Mall, with her 3-year-old son on a
leash, Famulari agrees. Watching her Dennis the Menace dismantle
the toy kiosk outside Banana Republic, she sighs that, if he weren't
harnessed, he would have already torn through the rest of the mall.
"There's at least one character that touches on everyone's
life," she laughs.
In fact, women are already relating to these characters as passionately
as they did the recently departed Carrie, Miranda, Charlotte and Samantha.
Says Syracuse University pop culturalist Bob Thompson: "'Desperate
Housewives' is ‘Sex and the City' if those four women got married, had
kids and moved to the suburbs."
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