Bill and Hillary - what makes them tick? 'My Buddy Bill' takes an entertaining look at that question
Speaking of what women want -- and it's not "Lipstick Jungle" -- we know what America’s most famous woman, Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.), is after: She wants to be president. But what makes her tick? What goes on between her and her husband? Few subjects in modern American politics have been more exhaustively explored.
But playwright and TV scribe Rick Cleveland (“Mad Men,” “Six Feet Under”) has found a fresh way of examining the couple, in an engaging, hourlong tale that begins, literally, as a shaggy dog story.
In “Rick Cleveland’s My Buddy Bill” (11 p.m. Thursday, Comedy Central), a one-man show filmed in New York, the writer recounts his first meeting with Bill Clinton, when he was in the White House and Cleveland was on the staff of “The West Wing.” At that chance meeting in the Oval Office, the two men bonded over their dogs, and when Clinton visited California, they played fetch with Bill’s dog Buddy and Cleveland’s pooch Sherlock on a stretch of Malibu beach.
Clinton talked that day about one day being free of motorcades and security details. “It’ll just be me and Buddy in a pickup truck,” Clinton said, according to Cleveland.
Cleveland leaves just the right pause in his monologue before recounting his deadpan reply: “What about Hillary?”
Cleveland has a wonderful eye for detail: At the groundbreaking for Clinton’s Arkansas library, presidential brother Roger Clinton was wearing a fringed jacket that made him look “like a member of the Allman Brothers.” At a dinner date with both Clintons, Cleveland was highly amused by a Secret Service agent’s query to another agent: “Do we have an ETA on Elvis?”
It’d be churlish to reveal too much about the jam session that followed a party at the Clinton library, or the tale of the pair’s impromptu trip to Amsterdam, which is the show’s high point (literally). All I’ll say is that a ukulele, a private jet and a famous Hollywood actor were involved in the latter jaunt, and that Cleveland tells all these stories with a carefully honed mixture self-deprecation, irony and wonder.
The slyly observed foibles of the three principals (the Clintons and Cleveland himself) make for an hour of entertainment that may amuse both sides of the partisan divide. But there’s a moral to “My Buddy Bill,” which is cleverly structured to build to this conclusion: Famous politicians have different agendas from regular people. Thanks to that cold fact, Cleveland’s strange acquaintance with the Clintons (and his charming show) comes to a very definitive end.
