Author: Starshine Roshell

Women's Bits

Published on September 11, 2014

There I was at my keyboard, writing about something sensible and semi-important, when this news popped up on my screen: “Nearly Half of Young Women in the U.K. Don’t Know Where Their Vagina Is.” And because a headline like that can’t be ignored, you’ll just have to wait for a sensible, semi-important column another time.

My first reaction to this news, naturally, was shock. I hadn’t realized that so many British women share a vagina. And not a one of them could track the thing down? To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, for one woman to lose such a thing may be regarded as misfortune; for hundreds to lose it looks like carelessness.

I kept reading and learned that a survey of 1,000 British women revealed that only half of those aged 26-35 were able to correctly identify the vagina on a simple diagram of a woman’s reproductive system. And I mean simple. Like if there’d been a “You are here” icon, the survey participants could have spun 180 degrees and seen their vaginas is how simple it was.

The survey also showed that while young gals generally did not know which way was up, older women could tell an ovary from a uterus just fine and a cervix from a fallopian tube, thank you very much.

Road Hazards: Driving with My Teen

Published on August 28, 2014

Like you, I’m a spiritual person given to pondering the great unanswerable questions of life. Like this little existential mystery:

Why in Saab’s name are 15-year-olds allowed to operate moving vehicles on public roadways?

I can think of no good reason why a person who still drops food from his mouth with stunning regularity — and alarming nonchalance — should be permitted to propel a half-ton, motorized murder machine through cityscapes occupied by innocent and unsuspecting humans.

It ain’t right.

So it’s only natural that I lurch into a sudden brace-for-impact stance when my son is driving and we are careening down a freeway off-ramp at rush hour into a snarl of ghastly gridlock.

“Mom, really? Can you not do this?” the giant child says, dramatically mimicking my dashboard death grip.

“Very well,” I say, calmly. “But what you didn’t see is that I stopped myself from screaming, ‘PLEASE, GOD, DON’T LET ME DIE IN AN UNDERPASS!’ So … that’s something.”

I fear for his safety, sure. And that of his fellow motorists. But it’s more than that. It’s bigger. From the first time he operated a wheeled vehicle — the Elmo lawn mower that helped him take his first steps, his fudgy feet flap-slap-flapping the ground as he pushed that thing from couch to kitchen and back again (boy, I hope he doesn’t read this) — I’ve been scared by what it signifies.

Too Old for a Micro-Mini?

Published on August 14, 2014

There’s a colorful old expression favored by cattish biddies. They let it fly when they spy a middle-aged woman sporting the flashy or revealing clothing you’d normally see on a much younger lass.

“Mutton dressed as lamb,” the harpies hiss, straightening the seams of their own sensible vestments and clomping away in their Easy Spirit mid-heel wedges.

I confess the phrase has been flitting, uninvited, through my head lately as I get dressed:

Hmm, the miniskirt today? Maybe, Ms. Mutton. Or the skinny jeans and pirate boots? Sounds great, Mutton Mama.

Mutton, if you didn’t know, is the meat of old sheep — although the sheep prefer to be called “mature.” It’s tougher than lamb. It’s cheaper. And according to one online cooking site, “Many find it distasteful.”

Since tough, cheap, and distasteful describe me and most of my girlfriends — and since, at 42, I just received a heck-yeah birthday gift card to Forever 21 — I have to wonder if I’ve skidded right over that lamb-to-mutton line without knowing it.

Let It Go? We're Trying

Published on July 31, 2014

It’s the parental fear that no generation before ours has yet grappled with: the terror that our children will grow up to be on a reality show. My particular dread? I’m raising a prime-time “hoarder.”

Never one to pass a rock without dropping it in his pocket, my youngest child weeps and wails if I throw out a year-old, splay-bristled, paste-encrusted toothbrush. He has Valentine’s candy from 2011 crammed into keepsake boxes in his tchotchke-stocked bedroom.

And last weekend, the boy refused to relinquish a pair of skate shoes whose canvas had torn away from the rubber soles up front, exposing his toes as he walked and flapping open like a chatty cartoon mouth. Even my grandmother, raised on scraps in the Oklahoma dust bowl, would call them “hobo shoes.” Though he left the shoe store with two new pairs, he wouldn’t — couldn’t — throw the old ones in the trash. So I did.

“It’s just …” he started, “I have a lot of good memories with those shoes.” Perfect, I reasoned. Then you don’t need the actual shoes. And memories don’t take up room in the closet.

It’s a constant battle: His sentimentality versus my efficiency. He has collections and mementos; I have goals and checklists. He loves to reminisce and savor the past while I strive to produce and stay ahead of the clock.

Wife-Carrying: An Actual Thing

Published on July 17, 2014

Her thighs are clamped around his neck and her arms clutch urgently at his waist but it’s not what you think. In fact, it’s nothing you’ve ever thought about before.

It’s the preposterous sport of wife-carrying, in which overconfident men race through a short obstacle course while toting their dead-weight spouses on their backs or shoulders. Lady-laden, the athletes wobble over logs or hay bales, slog through shallow pools, and stagger across the finish line as hundreds of strangers hoot from the sidelines.

The grand prize: The missus’s weight in beer. Plus $5 for each pound she weighs. Plus the head-shaking befuddlement of most other humans.

Wife-carrying originated in Finland a mere 19 years ago, which means we can’t pass it off as the quaint hobby of eccentric ancients; my marriage is older than this sport, people. Fans mumble something about it harking back to the bad habits of Finnish bandits who abducted women from their villages and claimed them as wives — but Finland also hosts the world championships for Air Guitar and Mobile Phone Throwing, so I think it’s safe to assume the Finns just like silly stuff.

Annual wife-carrying competitions are now held in Australia and Hong Kong, and even here in the U.S. a police officer and his wife stumbled to victory just this month in Wisconsin with a race time of 60 seconds — which, he said, was the longest minute of his life, and his cargo weighed only 103 pounds.

Ms. Roshell Goes to Washington

Published on July 4, 2014

Growing up in Tinsel Town, a gal gets jaded. Look, it can’t be helped. From before I could say “actors’ equity,” we lived directly beneath the glowing Hollywood sign. My folks were in “the industry” and hobnobbed with rock stars, deejays, and TV personalities. And by hobnobbed, of course, I mean got high and listened to album-oriented rock.

When you’ve watched soap-opera dreamboats flubbing their lines take after take, seen pop divas climbing into the makeup chair naked-faced and scowling, and heard Billboard chart-busters stinking up a sound check that should have ended hours ago — well, there’s little room left in your life for magic. (I once saw Dick Clark in his underwear, and it wasn’t even New Year’s Rockin’ Eve.)

All this to say that I grew up nearly incapable of reverence. Numb-ish to wonderment. And altogether apathetic toward the things that, as Americans, we’re supposed to venerate. Things like Thanksgiving, Walt Disney, the game of baseball, apple pie, railroad museums, and “our nation’s capital.”

Feh. Like Michigan, Alabama, and South Dakota, the District of Columbia isn’t somewhere I’d ever considered visiting. In fact, until this very month, I sort of believed “our nation’s capital” wasn’t a geographic reality so much as a vague mythical ideal like “nirvana” or “kingdom come” — you know, a literary conceit that helps establish tone and timbre when you’re waxin’ flashy in a tale about politics. Or House of Cards.

Are You a Feminist NOW?

Published on June 5, 2014

School’s out, and it’s a good thing, too — because across the world, young women are being kidnapped, raped, and shot to death while pursuing an education.

If that sounds shocking — terrific. I’m glad to know we haven’t yet become desensitized to the violence that female students are enduring. But we haven’t become sufficiently enraged about it, either. And that’s equally shocking. Remember when girls and women could go to school and expect to graduate unharmed? Here’s what’s happening now:

There are 164 Nigerian girls missing after being abducted from their school in April by Islamic terrorists who oppose Western education and have threatened to sell the girls into sexual slavery.
In the U.S., one in five women is being sexually assaulted during college, and more than 50 universities are being investigated by the Office for Civil Rights for mishandling sexual-assault cases on campus.
And here in our progressive, civilized town, six people were murdered when an angry young guy embarked on a rampage to “punish all females for the crime of depriving me of sex.” The killer, whose name will never appear in a column of mine, left written rants about waging a “war on women.”

Starshine at the SB Writers Conference

Published on May 24, 2014

This is a great Memoir panel I was on last year at the Writers Conference, with three other authors including the delightfully entertaining Jane Heller. Don’t worry–I’m not as anxious as I look in the freeze frame.

SBWC: Memoir Writing Panel from Ninety Degrees Media on Vimeo.

The Sting of the Strikeout

Published on May 22, 2014

I don’t love baseball. And I feel bad about that. Some of the finest people I know — people who are undeniably more advanced human beings than I am — are wild for the game. They love that it’s not timed, but rather over when it’s over; that it lets players of every shape and size be superstars; and that the object is more complicated than just putting a ball into a net, over a line, or through a hoop.

The closest I ever come to loving baseball was a brief tenderness I had for its distinctive snacks. It was 1981, and Fernando Valenzuela was pitching for Los Angeles, Steve Garvey was playing first base, and I was mowing Dodger Dogs, Cracker Jacks, and ice cream on the blistering Loge level.

Back then, I was a kid watching grown-ups play baseball. Recently I’ve revisited the sport as a grown-up watching kids play it, in Little League. But the new perspective hasn’t deepened my appreciation for our national pastime. In fact, it’s made me dread it.

Each time a kid gets up to bat and strikes out — my son or someone else’s, on our team or the opposing one, doesn’t matter — it positively guts me. Hollows out my stomach like an inverted baseball cap or a stadium peanut being popped from its salty shell.

Swing, miss! … Adjust stance. … Swing, miss! … Adjust grip. … Swing, miss! … Adjust self-image.

Where Does the Story End?

Published on May 8, 2014

Every book club is good at something. Whipping up themed dinners, for example. Or planning out meeting schedules a year in advance. Or spotting motifs and allegories throughout a novel.

My book club is advanced at arguing.

In our decade of existence, we’ve quarreled over the time, day, format, and frequency of meetings. We’ve squabbled about hardcover versus paperback and Kindle versus iPad. We’ve gone toe-to-toe over who would play the main character in the movie version and whether it was fair to choose a book in which a child dies. Yes, that happened.

We once had a particularly squawky and even tearful meeting that is still affectionately referred to as Book Club Fight Club.

We’re an opinionated bunch, and I love that about us. Who wants a book group that’s too timid to tell you what they really felt about a bildungsroman — or worse, who felt nothing at all?

What we argue about most is endings. The 12 of us can work ourselves into a good, literary lather over a tome’s final pages: an off-kilter epilogue, a dissatisfying denouement, an outrageous resolution that leaves us locking horns over whether the author is a genuine Joyce-ian genius, or in fact lacks the depth god gave a bookmark.