LOOK WHO’S TALKING
Michelle Obama to visit city
Michelle Obama, Harvard-trained lawyer, former first lady of the United States, self-described “mom-in-chief” and book tour rock star, is coming to Ottawa.
Obama will headline an afternoon event at the Canadian Tire Centre on Oct. 11 called A Conversation With Michelle Obama.
Obama has said that, on leaving the White House, she has been “unhooked from any obligation as a political spouse.” Reviewers of her events say the former first lady manages to make arena appearances feel like cosy chats.
“Michelle Obama is so charismatic that she really can make a speech in an arena feel intimate and vulnerable,” the news and opinion website Vox said in January of a book tour engagement at Brooklyn’s Barclays Centre, which attracted 20,000 attendees. Similar “in conversation with” Obama events during the book tour have sold out arena venues, with VIP tickets selling for as much as US$3,000.
There will be about 12,000 tickets for the Ottawa event, which is being held in partnership with the Ottawa Board of Trade. Many of the events across Canada, including a second engagement the same day in Hamilton, have also been sponsored by business organizations, said Ian Faris, president and CEO of the Ottawa Board of Trade.
“We see her message as being very appealing to an important demographic for the board of trade — young women,” Faris said.
Obama, 55, talks about her life at her events.
“I’m an ordinary person who found herself on an extraordinary journey,” she wrote in her bestselling 2018 memoir, Becoming.
Here’s what Obama won’t talk about: politics and Donald Trump. And she certainly has no intention of running for office herself.
“I have never been a fan of politics and my experience over the past ten years has done little to change that,” she wrote in Becoming, which became an instant bestseller upon its release last November, part of a joint book deal with her husband, Barack, which reportedly attracted a US$65-million advance.
Maybe Obama won’t talk about politics and Trump outright, but she said during the 2016 Democratic convention: “When they go low, we go high.” Vox noted that Obama “seems to be stumping for an election that hasn’t officially started yet. She’s reminding people that there is an alternative to Donald Trump, even if the Democratic party hasn’t quite decided on who that alternative is yet. And she’s priming her base to fight for whoever that candidate is.”
Obama has been in almost constant motion since her memoir was published. Becoming tells the story of her path from the working-class south side of Chicago to Princeton and Harvard, followed by a career in law and hospital administration before she was reluctantly “sucked in” to the political sphere with her husband’s 2008 run for president.
While it couldn’t exactly be described as tell-all, the memoir divulged that the guidance counsellor at her magnet high school in Chicago didn’t think Obama was “Princeton material” — she buckled down, applied anyway and was accepted — that she had a miscarriage and later conceived the couple’s daughters, Malia and Sasha, through invitro fertilization and that she went to an interview for a job as a vice-president with the University of Chicago Medical Centre with three-month-old Sasha on her lap.
Obama’s initiatives as first lady included programs encouraging physical fitness and healthy eating, supporting veterans and their families and promoting education, especially for girls.
Obama’s exhortation to students has always been to “use school.”
“I grew up with a disabled dad in a too-small house with not much money in a starting-to-fail neighbourhood, and I also grew up surrounded by love and music in a diverse city in a country where education can take you far,” Obama wrote in Becoming. “I had nothing or I had everything. It depends on which way you want to tell it.”
Ticket pre-sales will be held Monday through Ticketmaster. The remainder to go on sale Tuesday through Ticketmaster and the box office at the Canadian Tire Centre. There are six tiers of prices, ranging from the $2,000 VIP package, which includes front-row seats and attendance at a reception with up to 100 others, to $98 seats.
A Conversation with Michelle Obama begins at 1 p.m. on Oct. 11 and will be about an hour and a half in length. Attendees are asked to arrive by 12:30 p.m. to allow sufficient time to pass through security. jlaucius@postmedia.com