The Observer couldn’t resist. We already have Rachel Figueroa-Levin’s email, she of the brilliant El Bloombito Twitter feed. Since the mayor took the time out of his busy day to remark on her schtick, we thought we’d see what she had to say to him on the subject. Predictably, it was pretty funny. Read More
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Mayor Michael Bloomberg made a visit to Engine 166/Ladder 86 Fire Company on Staten Island today, to thank the firefighters there for their work and hold his second post-Irene press conference.
With clear skies and the city back to work, the mood was light enough for a daring reporter to ask the mayor about El Bloombito, the parodic Twitter account created this weekend by soap-making stay-at-home mom Rachel Figueroa-Levin. Good humored as always, the administration even posted the clip to its YouTube page, titled “El Alcalde Bloomberg habla sobre su esfuerzo por aprender español.” Read More
A few thousand people on Twitter can’t be wrong: The best thing about Hurricane Irene was the appearance among them of @ElBloombito, a sardonic, Spanglish-speaking caricature of Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his earnest attempts at becoming fluent in Spanish. (This is actually a typical occurrence at pretty much every press conference, but how many people watch mayoral press conferences on a regular basis?)
The Observer reached out to Rachel Figueroa-Levin, the 25-year-old native New Yorker behind the Twitter feed—she put her main feed in El Bloombito’s bio, never expecting either would become viral smashes—to find out who she was where she got this crazy idea.
Update I: Mayor Bloomberg Responds to El Bloombito >>
Update II: Rachel Figueroa-Levin Responds to Mayor Bloomberg Responding to El Bloombito >>
Like most things on Twitter, it started out as a joke. In an email, she told us, “I live in Inwood with my husband and nine-and-a-half-month-old daughter. I’m a stay-at-home mom and soap maker. We are in the process of buying a co-op in Inwood. (We close early September!) Soap making started as a hobby and turned into a mini business.” What follows is an interview conducted this evening on GChat. (What, you thought we would do a phone interview with an Internet star?) Read More
