On leadership, womanhood, and Ruinart at midnight.
You want a special night, for clients you call friends. When you hear Michelle Obama is in town, you pause. Would this be the right experience – one of those spots of time that Wordsworth wrote about, those intense memories that anchor our psychological reserves – a night in history? Take a risk. Just do it.
The former First Lady takes a trip down under and you want to treat those clients with such respect that you order the VIP option: front row, pre-event cocktails, the Sapphires with Jessica Mauboy rocking everyone in the room, the up-close-and-personal seats where you can’t quite believe this internationally loved woman is right there before you, natural, engaging, giving everything she has.
But you pause. Friends have different politics. How will that go over? What if politics becomes Michelle Obama’s main thread? Too close for comfort if this 90-minute session turns into Democratic rhetoric or anti-Trump sentiment. It’s not right to invite friends who hold a different political philosophy and then seat them inside a conflicting one.
But the First Lady was not about politics and propaganda. Her topic was life. Life according to Michelle Obama.
The hour and a half flew.
The evening began before she walked out. Sydney. 21 May. 5.30pm. We gathered – a VIP group, quietly buzzing with something hard to name. Anticipation, yes. But more than that. A desire to share something real with people who matter. Then the Sapphires came on, led by the incandescent Jessica Mauboy – voices that filled that room and softened everyone in it, turning a gathering of individuals into something closer to an occasion.
And then she appeared.
Michelle Obama. Up close. Unhurried. Completely herself. The political fears dissolved inside the first ten minutes. This was not a political evening. This was rarer: a woman at 62, standing in full possession of herself – her story, her humour, her hard-won wisdom – and sharing it with generosity and grace.
ABC journalist Leigh Sales was superb. Relaxed, curious, utterly human. She gave the audience the feeling they weren’t watching an interview but listening in on a real conversation – and she drew Obama out with such skill that Obama turned the tables, suddenly interviewing Sales back about her recent desire to play the cello. The audience felt the reversal before Sales did. When it landed on her, Sales gently pointed out she was supposed to be the one asking the questions. Obama’s response was that smile. That full-face, room-filling smile, followed by laughter she made no effort to contain. The audience was already with her.
Michelle Obama talked about the comfort she felt in her own skin at 62. How, like so many women, she had suffered from imposter syndrome as a younger woman – how men never felt that – but now she knows how wrong it was, and how men don’t know it all, they just think they do! The audience laughed. So did she.
Then she took us back. To the South Side of Chicago. A working-class home where money was modest and ambition enormous. Parents who believed in her. A neighbourhood that didn’t always believe in itself. The kind of upbringing that teaches you early the world won’t always open its doors – so you learn to knock harder, study longer, outlast the doubt. She spoke of prejudice not with bitterness but with the clarity of someone who understood it, moved through it, and refused to be defined by it.
She spoke of what the White House gave her – not power, but perspective. The people she met: Queen Elizabeth II, Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu, Stevie Wonder. The deep need she witnessed to educate children across America, across the board, regardless of where they start. And now, with her own children living independently, she puts her brain and her time to enriching her own life – and, quietly, the lives of others.
You could feel the room move. Not all at once – gradually, imperceptibly, then suddenly undeniably. Strangers leaning toward one another. Friends catching each other’s eyes. A hand on a shoulder. The audience becoming, without quite deciding to, a community.
And the photo opportunity – one-on-one with the First Lady. Words can’t explain.
Like Cinderella, the night came to an end. But we didn’t run. We looked at each other, bonded by this rare chance to hear in person this extraordinary American. We wanted to stop. To reflect. And so we found the bar at the Intercontinental Sydney still open, ordered a bottle of Ruinart, and toasted – the future, women, the world, and of course, the extraordinary First Lady who brought five friends together to make this toast possible.
This article originally appeared on Harper’s Bazaar.
