Michelle Obama on Being First Lady
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From the Time Interview
You know, I had this vision when … as we were going through the campaign and you started thinking about, okay, what if my husband wins and I’m the First Lady, what are the kind of things that I’d like to do? And you always get that question … or, I got that question a lot over the course of the campaign. But one of the things that I thought was, well, how powerful would it be for young girls to come into this space and hear from other really powerful, impressive, dynamic women, and to have that conversation go on here in the White House?
And as we sort of started thinking through the event and thinking about how I wanted to relate to the D.C. community, as well, I always thought whenever we invited somebody in, I wanted to go out to their space, too. I wanted that to be a mutual exchange; that it’s not just people coming here where I live, but it’s me going out to where they live.
So we’ve tried to do that in almost every event that we’ve done from, you know, the White House Kitchen Garden to whenever we go to a school and read to kids. Either their teachers or the kids will be invited back here very soon. That’s sort of a theme. (See pictures of the White House kitchen.)
So the event started coming together. And it came off so beautifully. I think it was … it’s one of those events that stand out in my mind as, this is why I’m here … to help make this possible and to see the faces on those girls as they entered the East Room in all its glory, and to be sitting around these tables with women they saw on TV, or saw on the news, and to have them having real conversations.
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That’s why I’m so touchy with kids, because I think if I touch them and I hug them, that they’ll see that it’s real, and then they’ll relax and breathe and actually kind of enjoy the time and make use of it.
But it was one of the most powerful events for me, because, again, I see myself in those girls, and the fact that we cut across socio-economic backgrounds, that we invited girls from public schools, from parochial schools, kids from private schools, and that they’re all sitting around the table as equals in this place, where they all felt some level of intimidation, right, so the playing field was relatively equal, it was a beautiful night.
