Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, Brutally Dragged for Completely Out of Touch ‘Tip’ for Kids Birthday Parties

Mindy Kaling, star of small and big screen, is currently running a show about the Buss family, which owns the Los Angeles Lakers.

To hear her tell it in a recent Time Magazine interview, one of the good things about the Busses — yes, you’re reading this correctly — “is that they really are a famously dysfunctional, extremely wealthy Los Angeles family.”

In other news, she made an appearance on the Duchess of Sussex’s upcoming Netflix cooking/home-making series, “With Love, Meghan.” The two things are apparently completely unrelated. Totally. No similarities whatsoever. Is my sarcasm slightly detectable?

In case you haven’t heard of it, “With Love, Meghan” is supposed to be an “at home with Meghan” cooking experience, albeit not at her own home; producers rented a mansion two miles away from where she lives to film it — which tells you how authentic your time with the Duchess of Sussex will end up being, should you choose to stream it.

Meghan also has her celebrity friends on, including Kaling — who was on maternity leave from show-running when she appeared and learned some very, very, practical tips from her down-home royal homegirl.

“I was on maternity leave with my daughter in March and April, and Meghan texted me that she was doing a show where she was going to cook for her friends. Would I want to come to Montecito and have her cook for me?” Kaling told Time in an interview published Feb. 19.

“I wanted to get taken care of in that moment of my life. That was a fun maternity leave field trip,” she said.

“And I left with a basket of fresh produce and homemade jam and hot sauce because she knew I loved hot sauce. She’s a very generous woman who knew I needed a break. Spoiler alert: I did.”

Yes, and what says “break” like appearing on someone else’s TV show and getting a bottle of hot sauce? What, did the hot sauce have Valium in it? If not, couldn’t she spring for another nanny for Mindy, or something?

And then came Kaling’s the description of the episode, which is really something else, even by the standards of the Sussexes.

“The theme was throwing a party for children,” Kaling said.

“I love cooking, but I’m really not good at entertaining. I don’t know anything about how you’re not supposed to use overhead lighting when people come over. You’re supposed to use little lamps.” [Emphasis mine.]

“But Meghan just knows how to do that stuff. For kids’ parties I usually just go to the party supply store and get paper things, which I don’t judge and neither does she,” Kaling continued. “But it was fun to learn simple ways to do a homemade kids’ party.” [Emphasis again mine.]

Oh, but this slice of inadvertent comedy just gets better.

“I think a misconception about Meghan is that she’s in any way fussy or has expectations of fanciness,” Kaling said. “She really is a down-to-earth person who knows a lot of fun tricks to make entertaining and cooking easier.”

Look, I don’t think the French Revolution was a particularly fantastic period of human history, and I’m not in favor of death as a rule, should it be in any way avoidable — but read this bit of what “down-to-earth” pseudo-bohemian royalty is supposed to look like, 235 years after the storming of the Bastille signaled that the age of high monarchy in Europe had jumped the shark, and you do kind of understand the Gallic impulse to send Marie Antoinette to the guillotine back in the day.

Let’s start with the fact that, when throwing parties for children, people who aren’t super-rich use the lights they have.

If they’re overhead, guess what? Use those. You don’t run out and buy “little lamps,” so that the kids can entertain themselves by throwing darts at them as a party game.

Oh Mindy🤦🏼‍♀️ We’ve been given a bit of a preview of Meghan Markle’s show, and it’s as awful as you think it would be. Their episode is about throwing parties for kids, and Meghan’s advice is, get this, no overhead lights for parties. Use little lamps.

If I roll my eyes any harder… pic.twitter.com/JdV3dEvqYx

— Royal News Network (@RNN_RoyalNews) February 20, 2025

But, I guess you can get away with little lamps — and hire adult supervision to ensure the hellions don’t destroy those little lamps — at the place where “With Love, Meghan” was filmed — described by the U.K.’s Daily Mail as “an idyllic $8 million … estate nestled within a gated community, [which] boasts eight acres of avocado trees and lemon groves and is owned by Montecito’s influential Cipolla family.”

Again, just down-to-earth stuff. Also, if you eat those avocados with hot sauce, I hear they’re delicious.

And while we’re at it, let’s talk about what Hollywood does to a person’s expectations on life. I may not agree with Kaling’s personal or political worldview, judging from what I know of her and her work, but she’d always seemed down-to-earth herself — at least in a town where uttering the phrase “do you know who I am?” during a traffic stop isn’t considered funny tabloid fodder but an actual life-hack.

She’s making a bio-series about the Busses, who “really are a famously dysfunctional, extremely wealthy Los Angeles family” — and she talks about the “down-to-earth” tips given to her for kids parties by her friend, a member of what most of us would consider “a famously dysfunctional, extremely wealthy Los Angeles family” who taught her the necessity of little lamps instead of overhead lighting for children’s parties. Is La La Land to common sense what the Bermuda Triangle was to military airplanes?

Maybe Kaling should have spent more of her maternity leave time on Tinseltown parenting deprogramming lessons, because I don’t know how this could have been worse press for either her or her friend the Duchess had it been planted in the press by their worst enemy, much less uttered by one of the individuals herself during an interview.

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