Category: Columns

Sex, politics, fashion and everything else a Gen-X everygal loves to dish about.

Mom's Got Germs

Published on March 17, 2011

Apparently, I am disgusting. Which is not something that I knew about myself.

Over the years, my children have educated me in the many ways that I am embarrassing, overbearing, and woefully ill-informed about things that truly matter. Like Clone Wars. And break dancing.

Only recently, though, have I learned that I am also polluted with a particularly aggressive and especially repugnant strain of cootie. For which, naturally, there is no antidote.

It’s the only way to explain why my children — who spent the first years of their lives gleefully gnawing on my fingers — now recoil when I offer them a bite from my fork, insist on fresh straws when I proffer my milkshake, and wipe off their cheeks (oh, no, they di’nt!) after I kiss them.

They don’t see the generosity in these gestures of mine; they see germs. Like I’m spewing deadly pathogens. Like I have a rare strain of parental Ebola that could seriously tweak their weekend plans.

A swipe of my ChapStick? Er, no thanks. A slurp of my ice cream cone? Um, I’ll pass.

I Was a Flash Mob Virgin

Published on March 10, 2011

You’ve seen it on YouTube and Modern Family. Swarms of inconspicuous passersby break into a seemingly spontaneous dance routine in a train station or the food court of a mall. Known as a flash mob, it’s a surprise public performance à la guerrilla theater, sans the buzzkilling political message.

Flash mobs create order out of chaos. In aiming solely to bewilder — and then delight — unsuspecting onlookers, they wind up doing much more: They celebrate the exuberant and unpredictable art of performance itself.

When I learned a New York choreographer was organizing a flash mob here in Santa Barbara, I signed on. I have no dance experience, but I can rock stretch pants and tie a do-rag on my head, so I figured I could fake “hip, urban hoofer” if necessary.

There were 120 people at the first rehearsal. Within a week, the number had dropped to 65 community members of literally every shape and size. Little girls. Old men. Giggling moms. In only five hours — and with just a little bloodshed — we learned the keys to conjuring order from chaos: Frustration. Repetition. Sense of humor. Motown.

“I’m Doug, and I’m a recovering choreographer,” said our “mob” boss Doug Elkins, in town for a residency with Santa Barbara’s esteemed DANCEworks program. He started us off with fancy arm work in our Lobero Theatre seats, and soon had us up onstage adding fast footwork. Elkins knew it wouldn’t be easy: “If it gets confounding or frustrating” (it did), “just go with your favorite curse” (we did).

'Yo Mama' Still Draws Laughs, Wrath

Published on March 3, 2011

You want to spark a fella’s fury fast? Go after his mama. Young or old, nothing roils a guy’s ire like snarky jabs at Dear Old Mom. Miami Heat forward LeBron James demonstrated this during a recent match against the Pistons in Detroit.

It was late in the first quarter when a Pistons fan shouted, “LeBron, is your mom going to Boston for Valentine’s Day?” James paused on the sidelines and looked as if he might ignore it — as he does most of the smack-talk he hears on the road — but then spun around and got in the heckler’s face.

“I don’t give a [bleep] what you say,” James told the rude dude. “But don’t be disrespectful.”

But then, disrespect is sort of the point, isn’t it? Infantile but effective, matriarchal mockery has been tweaking tempers for generations. “Yo mama” invectives have their roots in slavery, when African-Americans exchanged the swipes as verbal sport, or good-natured battles of social one-upmanship.

Funny that after all these years, such low-brow put-downs can still whip up powerful emotions. Are we genetically programmed to chafe at mommy slander?

Comedian Ribs the Sisterhood

Published on February 24, 2011

You find the wildest stuff at Whole Foods. Goji berry juice. Ancient Egyptian Kamut flakes. A dried “sea veggie” called agar agar. But the most intriguing thing I’ve ever had there was a frank and funny discussion about feminism with my friend Kimmie Dee.

A stand-up comedian, Kimmie is opening for outrageous comic Doug Stanhope on March 5 at Velvet Jones. We bumped into each other in the produce section, and she told me about the show:

“I’m gonna do it,” she said, glancing nervously at the female shoppers plucking perfect pomegranates from the bins behind us. “I’m gonna throw women under the bus.”

The phrase left me immediately, mischievously, exhilarated. There’s something about standing in a market full of shockingly conscientious goods that makes me want to be bad — and every woman knows that sedition to the sisterhood is bad bad bad. Women’s rights have come a long way, but have we yet earned the right to rag on other women?

When to Say When

Published on February 17, 2011

The first time I heard my toddler curse another driver from the backseat, I realized that our kids learn an awful lot through observation. The key word being “awful.” Whether we’re driving aggressively, snacking unhealthily, or saying, “No, sorry,” to the panhandler outside the market, our progeny are watching. They’re listening. They’re learning. It’s unnerving.

We try to model thoughtful grown-up behavior. We try to embody — or at least convincingly imitate — the people we hope our children will eventually become: Respectful and responsible, courageous and considerate. We’re even careful not to gripe (out loud) when our own parents call during dinner, because someday that will be us. We’ll be the ones phoning our kids at inopportune times, and by god, they’d better answer with smiles on their faces.

But right now, we’re facing a tough grown-up task that’s made all the tougher under our kids’ searing scrutiny: managing our aging dog’s demise.

Jasper is 15, which is a-hundred-and-ancient in dog years. The boys have never lived a day without her.

Once the energy core of the family, she’s now a fluffy but matted rug that lies against the front door and can barely be budged when we come and go. She still barks, but it’s mostly at us, since her cloudy eyes can’t always tell who we are.

She’s stone deaf. Her hips slip. She sometimes leaves messes on the floor. And we invest more each month in her pain pills than we do in our boys’ college savings.

Marriage by iChat

Published on February 10, 2011

Got big plans for Valentine’s Day? I do. I’m hoping to get booped. Repeatedly, resplendently booped. By my husband, of course — I’m not a loose booper.

“Booping,” in our cheeky marital vernacular, means sending instant messages to one other via our computers. My spouse and I both work at home; in separate rooms, on opposite ends of our house, we cyberchat each other all day long, our Mac speakers pertly chirping with each incoming missive:

Boop! “Hi, babe.”

Boop! “Hi, back.”

Boop! “How’s work coming?”

Boop! “Slowly but slowly. U?”

Boop! “Ugh. Need. More. Coffee.”

The dialogue may seem dull and the practice pointless; if we hollered, we could hear each other, and if we opened our office doors and craned our necks, we could actually see each other. Like, in person.

But booping is actually better. It’s easy. It’s fun. And despite social scientists’ fears that quick-yak portals like iChat, Skype, and AIM spell certain doom for interpersonal relationships, booping can be deliciously — unexpectedly — intimate.

In a recent survey by Shape and Men’s Fitness magazines, the majority of male and female readers said that texting, emailing, and other forms of hi-tech chatting led them to have sex earlier in their relationships than they might have otherwise. Why? Through cyber-flirting, they felt connected.

Grief with a Side of Popcorn

Published on February 3, 2011

Okay, I admit it. I’m a sucker for a stud on a stallion.

When it comes to kid flicks, I’ll suspend disbelief for any number of tired old tropes. I’ll endure sinister stepmothers and musical montages wherein fiercely loyal woodland creatures lead plucky-if-impossibly-thin-waisted princesses through whole new worlds of eye-twinkling wonder. Long as the theater’s dark and the popcorn’s crunchy, I’m immoderately tolerant of pixie dust, talking race cars, and other absurd cinematic conceits committed in the name of outright emotional manipulation.

Sure. I’m down with that. But there’s one stunt perpetrated by children’s movies that really cracks my glass slipper, converting me from Happy to Grumpy in a single animated scene: It’s killing off a beloved character — only to revive him miraculously, senselessly, for a happy ending.

I’m not talking about faded fairies who can only be reanimated with our earnest belief, or giant iron robots who self-reassemble after being obliterated by missiles. I’m not whining about lion kings whose voices echo through their offsprings’ ears from beyond the grave. I don’t even take issue with close calls, near deaths, or even seemingly inescapable doom; the trash-incinerator scene in Toy Story 3 was one of the most riveting things I’ve ever seen on the screen, an almost shockingly mature, dialogue-less treatise on friendship and acceptance that left my heart racing, eyes brimming.

Who Loves Jury Duty?

Published on January 27, 2011

I know the drill. I know how I’m supposed to act.

The moment the Jury Summons arrives in the mail, I’m supposed to exclaim, “No! NO!!” and begin moaning about how I haven’t time for such things. Convinced there are better people for the task (and by “better” I mean “less good”), I’m required to bitch and sigh as I cancel appointments, reschedule meetings, and call in favors: “Would you believe I’ve got jury duty?” I’m supposed to spit those last two words like they’re profane. Like they’re “rectal exam” or “Sarah Palin.”

But I was called to jury duty last week and, having been empaneled on a criminal case and tasked with sussing out the whole nuthin’-but-the-truth truth, I should probably be honest here: I flipping love jury duty.

With the exception of having to remove my belt and shuffle prisoner-like through a security scanner (sadly, no one touched my junk), I loved everything about the experience. I loved it so much, I can’t even remember why I’m supposed to hate it.

In fact, I’m starting to suspect that all those so-called “friends” who advised me to wear my underpants outside of my trousers or tell the judge “I hate white people” so that I’d be dismissed as a lunatic, were really only trying to keep spots on the jury open for themselves. Because they know how much fun it really is.

Correcting Others' Children

Published on January 20, 2011

Thump. Thud, thud. Whack! Whack! Whack!

You’re halfway through your entrée when the child in the next booth goes all Keith Moon on your backrest.

First you ignore it. When the pounding continues, you glance over at the parents — the universal signal for, “Your child needs guidance, or restraints, and I don’t care which.”

His final blow sends petite sirah sloshing down your dry-clean-only date-night blouse, and you launch over the booth, locking eyes with Thumper.

“Sweetie,” you say between clenched teeth, “there’s a person sitting here. It’s time to stop.” Considering what you were really thinking, the comment is friendly, sensitive, and generous. It doesn’t matter, though; you could say, “Thank you, sir. May I have another?” and it would still cause the drummer boy’s parents to regard you as though you’d just stabbed their musical angel with your salad fork.

My mom friends say they feel “hateful” and even “violent” when someone else — particularly a stranger — reprimands their kids. And I honestly don’t get it.

Aura You Single?

Published on January 13, 2011

What do you wear to a meeting with a psychic? This is the mystic puzzle that plagued my soul the morning I met Pamala Oslie, a Mission Canyon resident who reads people’s auras the way fortune-tellers read palms. Auras are said to be halo-like energy fields that surround us, revealing our personalities through their various colors. Most people can’t see them; Oslie can.

“I do psychic work, clairvoyant work, mediumship,” she said. “Auras are my tool.”

She recently teamed with Santa Barbara artist and social activist Rod Lathim to create an Internet dating site that matches people based on the colors of their aura. LoveColors.com launched in September and already has thousands of members hailing from San Francisco to Sioux City to Washington, D.C., and from Ireland to Australia. A hefty chunk of the sign-ups are from Southern California.

The concept: Our aura colors correspond to personality traits. Reds are physical and sexual; Blues are loving and nurturing; Yellows are fun-loving and childlike; etc. And by whittling down the dating pool based on compatible colors/personalities, we’re more likely to find suitable companions.

I wore solid gray to meet with Oslie so as not to pollute any vivid vibes radiating from my pasty-hued winter flesh — but then, what do I know? Despite the cosmic sensibility that my name implies, I’m skeptical of woo-woo: tarot, astrology, voodoo (is voodoo woo-woo?).