Don’t mind her manners: Starshine learns that a trip around the cotillion ballroom is a lesson in balancing party punch and guarding your backside. Your fancy prancy backside.
Writer & Columnist • Santa Barbara, CA
Author: Starshine Roshell
If it weren’t for my girlfriends, I would know nothing.
Over delicate lunches and sloppy happy hours, they keep me abreast of life’s juicy tidbits; which teachers are retiring and which couples divorcing, which restaurants are closing and which movies opening.
But my gal pals caught me off guard recently when they told me about a freaky new nether-trend. I was biting into an overpriced burger downtown when one of my diva dining companions let this rip:
“Ever heard of a labe trim?”
Surely I had heard her wrong; I demanded clarification.
“Getting snipped. Down there. You know… to make it… neater.”
She could have at least waited ’til I was finished chewing.
It’s wedding season again, and that means half of every aisle-trodding couple will be struggling with the decision of whether to take on their spouse’s last name or keep their own. But according to a new trend, it might not be the half you think.
The California Assembly passed a bill last week that, if adopted by the Senate and signed by the governor, will allow newly married men to change their last names as easily as women do. A bride needs only to fill out some forms and notify her credit card companies if she wants to take her husband’s name. But a growing number of grooms — from Mike Davis-turned-Salinger in Seattle to Christopher Sclafani-turned-Rhee in Washington, D.C. — are opting to take their wives’ last names instead, either to honor the women’s heritage, preserve a family name that’s at risk of dying out, upgrade to an easier-to-spell moniker, or simply do their small part to roll back centuries of gender inequity.
We weren’t even in the park yet when the perjury began.
Giddy with the excitement that only a day at the Magic Kingdom can conjure, my friend told Disneyland’s parking attendant that she had given him a $50 bill rather than a $20 — just to watch him squirm.
I apologized to the unfortunately dressed, overweight gentleman and told my friend that she simply couldn’t pull that crap here.
If you lie at Disneyland, I explained, you go straight to hell.
Feature story on Butterbean Farms for Santa Barbara magazine.
On the same day scientists announced the mysterious disappearance of the nation’s honeybees, Starshine Roshell actually found the little buggers. They were in her garage.
College is supposed to be a place where the safety of childhood overlaps with the freedom of adulthood. But last week, Starshine laments, it wasn’t.
On the highway of life, nothing forces an appreciation of the here and now like the crowded, noisy chaos of family road trip. Starshine explains.
Last weekend, like all weekends before it, I was confronted with a barrage of shame-inducing images: Fleshless twenty-somethings flitting along downtown sidewalks in jeans tighter than the skin on grapes. Itty bitty bikinis dangling in department store windows, looking more like polka dot rubber bands than something that might actually cover my ba-donk-a-donk.
Whiny, drooly and prone to mess themselves just as you’re headed out the door, puppies and newborn babies have a lot in common. But who’s more trouble?