I don’t know how many of you read about this, but it keeps showing in the news. Kelly Clarkson, a singer, went into Brooklyn’s Art of Play, asked about a $15,000 mechanical singing bird, and felt the employee looked her over and assumed she couldn’t afford it. She publicly compared it to the famous Pretty Woman shopping scene. Art of Play says the bird, Molly, was essentially its mascot and wasn’t for sale, although another similar bird could be obtained from its maker. Clarkson then accused the store of lying. Surveillance footage has now emerged, but it has no audio, so it can’t resolve what was actually said or the tone in which it was said.
Kelly Clarkson thought she was having a Pretty Woman moment. Maybe she was, maybe someone looked at her clothes, her baseball cap, her appearance, and decided that she couldn’t afford a $15,000 mechanical bird. Maybe the tone was exactly as condescending as she remembers it and maybe there are pieces of that five-minute encounter that a silent security camera will never tell us.
But I keep thinking about something else: I keep thinking about the size of things.
A woman walks into a store, an employee may or may not speak rudely to her, and then she leaves angry. This is the kind of tiny human collision that happens thousands of times every day. It might have happened to you…to me…except this woman has millions of people listening, and so….. the tiny thing becomes enormous.
The shopkeeper becomes a character in a story; strangers who weren’t there choose sides, people leave comments and reviews, reporters investigate, security footage is released, and millions of us watch.
And somewhere in the middle of all this sits Molly, a mechanical bird worth $15,000!
There is something almost painfully perfect about this little mechanical bird, because while we argue about who was allowed to buy it, the world outside that little Brooklyn shop continues to turn: people wake up frightened about money, someone loses a job, someone skips something they need because they cannot afford it, somewhere a child is hungry, somewhere another human being is running from a war. And here we are, discussing the wounded dignity of a millionaire who may have been mistaken for someone who couldn’t afford a $15,000 bird.
That doesn’t mean her feelings don’t matter; they do! But that’s exactly the point- everyone’s dignity matters. That includes the dignity of a woman who actually cannot afford the bird, the dignity of the person standing behind the counter, the dignity of people who will never have the luxury of discovering whether a stranger has underestimated their purchasing power.
I’ve always loved the famous Pretty Woman scene. Vivian returns to the boutique carrying bags from expensive stores and delivers the line we’ve all enjoyed for decades: the saleswoman made a very expensive mistake. But I think we’ve been celebrating the wrong victory. What if Vivian had actually been poor? What if she really couldn’t afford the clothes? Would the saleswoman’s contempt have been acceptable then?
Surely the lesson cannot be: Be careful whom you humiliate; she might secretly be rich.
Surely it has to be: Don’t humiliate people.
Money shouldn’t be the plot twist that makes someone worthy of respect……
And there is another difference between that movie and our world.
Vivian had money. Kelly Clarkson has something even more powerful: attention.
Today, one person can walk away from an unpleasant five-minute encounter and place it before millions of people. A moment that once would have ended on a Brooklyn sidewalk can become a national argument before the shopkeeper has finished his day.
That power changes the moral equation. The more people who can hear us, perhaps the more careful we should become about what we ask them to hear. This is not because powerful people surrender the right to be hurt, but because power should make us more restrained, not less.
Maybe that is what bothers me about this strange little story.
We have confused being seen with being important, being able to buy something with being worthy of respect, and increasingly confuse our ability to command attention with the importance of whatever has happened to us. Meanwhile, the world keeps spinning; most human suffering will never trend, and most acts of kindness won’t either. Someone will forgive someone…. someone will share the little money they have…someone will sit beside a frightened stranger, but none of it will receive forty million views, and this should make us wonder whether the things receiving the most attention are really the things most deserving of it.
Maybe the question isn’t whether Kelly Clarkson could afford the bird but it is why all of us stopped to watch….
