Where is Felicity Huffman's spouse, William H. Macy, in the college admissions scandal?... - 0 views
www.washingtonpost.com/...9-90f0-0ccfeec87a61_story.html
college admission scandal culture parenting
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Why was Felicity Huffman’s husband, an equally famous actor, not also charged with trying to bribe and fraud his kids’ way into college?
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“Oh, I bet I know why,” sighed one friend, currently mired in her own kids’ school applications. “It’s because the moms have to do everything, including organize the crime.”
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Macy, for what it’s worth, actually appeared to be a very involved parent. In the recorded phone calls, it was SPOUSE who brought up that his kid needed high enough scores for Georgetown. It was SPOUSE who declared the kid would perform better if the family could finagle an extended two-day SAT testing period, usually reserved for students with learning disabilities.
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Huffman’s “Housewives” character spent one episode trying to bribe her twins’ way into a private school, BuzzFeed points out (for $15,000 — is that how Huffman knew it was the going rate?), and so, the story goes, of course Huffman would do the same in real life.
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The most vomitous line in the whole indictment comes from a dad — New York attorney Gordon Caplan — who tells a witness on the phone, “To be honest, I’m not worried about the moral issue.”
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Radar ran an anonymously sourced article in which a family friend says Macy “didn’t know the details, but he knew she was trying to do something. . . He wasn’t fully aware of what she was planning.” Truly, I’m not sure which is a worse scenario for Macy: that he blithely participated in an alleged illegal plot, or that he blithely participated in an entire phone call in which the alleged illegal plot was hatched and apparently didn’t know what anyone, including himself, was talking about.
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in terms of moral dissonance, Felicity Huffman is the most surprising villain, and the one whose motives I keep trying to unpack.
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Huffman created the website What the Flicka, dedicated to parenting. Specifically, to being a mom. Even more specifically, to being a real, relatable, imperfect mom.
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WhatTheFlicka.com is a land of sardonic coffee mugs and wine-o’clock-Wednesdays, and scented candles with names such as “Juice Cleanse” that purport to smell like “greens, mint, and regret.” The articles about parenting have headlines such as “10 ways I’m totally screwing up my kids” and “10 reasons to dread summer with kids” and “9 ways parenthood is like ‘Game of Thrones.’ ”
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In other words, the site buys into a children-are-a-battlefield theory of parenting. Parenthood is impossible, and making it to bedtime without becoming an alcoholic is an excellent reason to reward yourself with a martini. We are all a hot mess!
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In Felicity’s mind, did she do something at odds with her theory of motherhood, or was the alleged scamming an extension of it? Was allegedly buying her kids’ way into school a twisted, privileged version of, Ladies, amiright, sometimes we serve frosting for dinner and sometimes we bribe Georgetown?
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“Ruh Ro!” she chirpily wrote in an email to her contact in the scam. “Looks like [my daughter’s high school] wants to provide own proctor.” It was a problem to be solved, practically and without much fuss.