Let me start by saying this isn’t meant to be negative about Christine Ebersole.
It isn’t really even about her.
I’ve seen her as a recurring guest star in several television shows I enjoy — as President Dalton’s wife in “Madam Secretary” and as Eddie’s mother on “Blue Bloods.” Pleasant enough, but without the star quality that draws your attention to her whenever she is on screen.
She is certainly a good actress who has had a very successful career, but I never really thought of her as someone special.
But I was looking at a list of 150 people who had been involved with “Saturday Night Live.” In the short bio that went with her picture, I saw that in 2007 she had won the Tony award as Best Actress in a Musical for her performance in “Grey Gardens.”
Think about that for a minute. Of all the women in starring roles in Broadway musicals that year, Ebersole was honored as the very best.
Not outstanding.
Not one of the best.
The very best performance by an actress in a Broadway muiscal that year.
Enough about her, though. The same principle works in many other ways. If a baseball player has a season that’s far above his usual performance and he wins the MVP award, he can know for the rest of his life that there was a time he has the best ballplayer in the league.
On a much lesser scale, when I was working as a newspaper columnist in 1997, I won several awards in the Society of Professional Journalists competition. It was only the Inland California chapter, but that year I won the Sweepstakes award as the best writer/reporter in the competition.
One chapter, one year.
I think they call it bragging rights, even if the only bragging you do is to yourself.
There are two things about the award that bother me.
First, I only did it once.
Second, it was so damned long ago.
Oh, well. At least it happened once.