michellej 2.0

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But they do care—about each other. This is a family that is smart enough to know it’s going places, and nearly every episode contains at small attempt at betterment. Realizing her girls lack a certain polish, June sends them warily to an etiquette class with a teacher from Atlanta who treats them with the alarm of an assimilated Hebrew Aid worker assisting a bewildered greenhorn. (June also clips coupons with a ferocity familiar to anyone who had a bubbe who never threw out a paper bag or a rubber band.) Alana’s pageant career seems less about the ambitions of a stage mom channeling her frustrations into her daughter than having a goal and working toward it, and learning to work through the inevitable and frequent disappointment with no loss of enthusiasm—a challenge young Alana rises to with enough buoyancy to make Winston Churchill proud. When Sugar Bear, who works seven days a week in a chalk mine to make ends meet, shyly faces the camera with the family’s pet teacup pig cradled tenderly in his arms and his lips curled self-consciously around his bad teeth—as if to suggest “who knows? Alana could be Miss America someday”—I actually cried. It reminded me, vividly and searingly, of my beloved great-uncle’s assertion that his father wanted him to go to America because “there a Jew could be anything, even President of the United States.