Michelle Obama’s message: Be bold, be yourself

Former first lady brings book tour to sold-out SAP Center

SAN JOSE >> Michelle Obama, the former first lady and current best-selling author, delivered an evening of empowering messages to about 12,500 people who filled the SAP Center in San Jose to capacity Friday.

It was the Bay Area stop on Obama’s sold-out tour in support of “Becoming,” the hit memoir that reportedly has sold more than 3 million copies and ranks as the top-selling book of 2018.

The evening started with Obama aiming a question at the audience:

“What are you becoming?”

Then, five people came onstage to answer that question. One of them was Ayesha Curry, wife of Golden State Warriors all-world player Stephen Curry and a globally known author, chef and TV personality. All five delivered the kind of answers that would work well at the start of a college essay, basically proclaiming that they were on their way to becoming the better versions of themselves.

Then came a lengthy video segment about Obama’s life, starting with her childhood on the South Side of Chicago.

“I had nothing or I had everything, depending on which way you tell it,” Obama (who was born Michelle Robinson) said in the video.

As the scenes progressed, she moved on to Princeton, a law career and then the White House, as the wife of Barack Obama, the 44th president of the United States.

“I’m an ordinary person who found herself on an extraordinary journey,” she said.

As the video dimmed, Michelle Obama finally took the stage, greeted by the kind of rapturous applause that would make Justin Timberlake, Taylor Swift or BTS jealous.

The moderator was veteran radio journalist Michelle Norris, former host of NPR’s “All Things Considered” and founding director of the Race Card Project.

While the questions and topics varied, Obama’s answers seemed to keep coming back to the theme of the evening — becoming the person who you want/need to be.

Obama, a great storyteller who thrives in the spotlight, talked about how it’s never too late to try something new. She addressed the oft-asked question to a child — “What do you want to be when you grow up?” — and called it the “worst question in the world,” because of how it puts pressure on people to stick with one thing and not embrace change.