If Michelle Obama were wearing fluorescent fuchsia Hammer pants and a furry Kangol, I'd still recognize her. She could be buying breath mints at CVS just for the $20 cash-back offer or sprinting up the left side of the escalator and I'd stop to gawk. She's the first lady of the United States, and I know what she looks like.

Last month an Associated Press photographer snapped a picture of Obama in a Nike hat and shades while she anonymously shopped at a Virginia-area Target. CBS News ran an incongruously serious segment on the paparazzi photo:

"Do you recognize this woman? Yes, in that ball cap, behind those sunglasses, is the first lady of the United States. She spent about half an hour in the store pushing her own cart, but apparently the only person who recognized her was the cashier."

Really? That's it? The cashier? No one else in the entire mega-store noticed that one of the most recognizable women in the free world was getting her Target on? 

On Wednesday in an interview with Today's Al Roker, Obama confirmed that she likes to "sneak out as much as possible" in an effort to "keep our kids' lives normal.

"I do that more frequently than people realize, and it's amazing how people don't recognize you. They don't expect to see me at Starbucks or at Chipotle," she said.

"I've been in Baskin-Robbins a number of times. You know how the kids aren't really paying attention. They're looking right through you; they don't know it's me."

Is it just me or is recent "news" that the president's wife, the closest thing Americans have to a royal highness, traipses about unnoticed a bit unsettling? Shouldn't most people with working eyes know what she looks like?

Conservative conspiracy theorists, also known as commenters, might say that because of increasingly hostile political storm clouds gathering around "class warfare," Michelle Obama is simply doing her part to ease tensions. Her down-to-earth sneak attacks, in which she appears as the American Normal Woman, are actually expertly choreographed photo shoots. I doubt that.