Writer & Columnist • Santa Barbara, CA
Sex, politics, fashion and everything else a Gen-X everygal loves to dish about.
Take out a pencil. This is a test.
Which of the following best describes parents who pick up their children from school and ask,
“Hey, how’d you do on that math test?”
Yeah, take your time on this one. It’s tricky.
I met Steve Martin when I was a kid. We were at a party, and I shadowed the poor guy all afternoon, waiting for him to crack me up, to slip into character. He never did.
Where was the Wild and Crazy Guy? Where was The Jerk? Where was King Tut?
Years later, he granted me an interview about his play Picasso at the Lapin Agile. In a dumb attempt to catch him off guard, to give my readers the Steve Martin I was sure they really wanted, I asked him if he preferred boxers or briefs. I don’t recall his good-sport answer — only that he uttered it earnestly, artlessly. It seems I’d finally located The Jerk; it was me.
It’s easy to forget that entertainers aren’t always entertaining, and that they’re deeper — and sometimes duller — than their onstage personas.
Though Martin once wore a gag arrow through his head, in real life he’s far more the reticent sophisticate of It’s Complicated than the inane pratfaller of The Pink Panther. But he’s more than those, too: He’s also a successful playwright, Grammy-winning banjo player, and avid art collector who just published a novel, An Object of Beauty, set amid New York’s high-brow art scene.
One word comes to mind as I watch my husband and sons scramble over our extremely pitched roof, stringing lights over the precarious edge of our home: balance.
It’s hard to find during the holidays, isn’t it? I’ve yet to master the balance between magic and madness, that elusive equilibrium between what the season should be about (family, friends, and gratitude) and what it actually, quickly becomes about (overspending, overeating, and buttoning up your coat for yet another bothersome obligation).
Heres one that no longer jingles my bells: I cannot bring myself to haul the family to a bustling parking lot, scout for the least-mangled tree, curse its $80 price tag, wrestle it into a stand, curse its asymmetry, argue about which unsightly side should face the wall, curse it for tilting, crawl underneath it to add daily water, live in fear of its flammability, and ultimately drag it, browned and battered, to the curb before vacuuming pine needles from the abused rug below.
I can’t do it. You can’t make me.
As a child, it was enchanting to have a huge, live tree in the house — no less astounding than if we’d dug a pond in the middle of the living room: How can this be? It’s magic!
School’s out, wizards! After a decade of playing Hogwarts students, the cast of the Harry Potter movies has finally graduated. Part I of the final film installment hit screens last week, and Part II is set for a July release.
Stars Daniel Radcliffe and Rupert Grint are said to have shed tears on the last day of filming. But Tom Felton, who’s played Potter’s pale nemesis Draco Malfoy all these years, is relieved to finally step off of the set where he quite literally grew up.
Movie stardom has drawbacks, Felton told Britain’s Daily Mail: Schoolmates teased him. He was contractually bound to avoid the sun for 10 years. And heaps of money — combined with teenage naïveté — got him into trouble with the tax man.
“One thing that people [say] to me is that the wealth and the fame must have made up for missing out on my childhood,” said Felton, who dismisses the idea as ridiculous. “You will never get those years back, and you can’t put a price on them.”
Indeed, young stardom is a precarious state of being. Some actors, like Natalie Portman and Neil Patrick Harris, spin early fame into brilliant careers; others, like Lindsay Lohan and Corey Haim, spin out of control before they’re even old enough to legally see their own R-rated flicks.
I live to sparkle. To glimmer. To gleam. Blame it on my name, or too many formative hours spent draping Barbie in disco lamé (that’s lah-MAY, which, for the record, is the distinct shimmering opposite of “lame”). Whatever the cause, the result is that I wear sequined sneakers, carry a rhinestone-peppered purse, and shot a titanium stud through my nostril so I could have permanent bling on my face.
I’m a chick who likes to twinkle, okay? But I draw the line at gilding the lily.
A scintillating new trend in girly grooming has some gals (let’s call them “adventurous”) bedecking their vajannies with jewels. That’s right. Paving the privates with stick-on gems in custom designs: heart, starburst, fleur-de-lis.
More resplendent than the downtown display itself is the fun-to-utter name of this privates practice: It’s called vajazzling. And some celebs find it va-dazzling. D-lister Kathy Griffin, Snooki from Jersey Shore, and Jennifer Love Hewitt are all stuck on the habit like diamonds on a … well, you get the idea.
San Francisco supes, where ya been all my life?
In a landslide vote last week, Fog City’s board of Supervisors made it illegal for fast-food eateries to include toys in kiddie meals that fall below reasonable nutrition standards. No more can the area’s burger mills market high-calorie, high-fat, high-sodium food to children with the promise of a plastic, princess-shaped choking hazard in every grease-stained sack.
It was a bold move, to be sure — a move undertaken to deflate ballooning childhood obesity rates, and a move that left the Happy MealTM-hawking McDonald’s corporation understandably unHappyTM.
But I, for one, applaud it.
Oh, I know your new law will be ridiculed. I know loud-howling liberty-lovers will call your “eat this, not that” edict an audacious obstruction of free enterprise and a bass-ackward Band-Aid of a solution to a staggeringly complex socio-economic problem. Also, let’s face it, the crap food is still being served at irresistibly low prices, and this is exactly the sort of chop-off-our-hands-to-keep-us-from-harming-ourselves legislation that makes us liberals seem so frighteningly stupid.
We’ve all got a dirty little secret. A vulgar habit. A nasty pastime we strive to hide from others. Because if the world knew of our crude obsession, we’d be mocked. And rightly so.
I grapple with my secret as I stand in line at the supermarket check-out, trying fruitlessly to resist its seductive call. No, it’s not the king-size bar of Milky Way Midnight Dark. Not the carcinogenic carton of Camel no-filters.
My vice is fueled by the front of a glossy gossip magazine brandishing words on which no intelligent person should find herself fixating: Courteney Cox and David Arquette split!
Let me be clear. I don’t like either one of these actors. I neither admire nor relate to them and might very well turn down an invitation to join them for tapas. And I love tapas.
Yet I feel compelled to know that the couple is ending their marriage after — apologies in advance — not having had intercourse for several months.
Pet Care. Kickball. Archery. Cub Scouts earn a colored belt loop for each cool new skill they master. Strangely, the organization doesn’t make a loop for the lesson that’s being taught to the little boys in Pack 70 of University Park, Texas: intolerance.
The pack’s leaders stripped a fellow dad of his uniform and troop leadership role earlier this month because he’s gay.
That’s all. Just gay.
For two years, Jon Langbert and his nine-year-old son, Carter, were active in the pack; Carter has more than 15 loops on his belt for fishing, woodworking, basketball, and chess.
Langbert was once a Cub Scout himself and treasures memories of building pinewood derby cars with his own dad. But he worried about joining with Carter.
“I was concerned about the gay issue,” he told me last week. “I called the Cubmaster and said, ‘Hey, I’m a gay guy and my son wants to sign up. Is there going to be any problem with that?'” The Cubmaster welcomed him, and the pack even nominated him to run its popcorn-sales fundraiser. A Harvard Business School grad, Langbert brought sales up from \$4,000 to \$13,000 in one year.
My husband doesn’t dance. Doesn’t know how, doesn’t try, and doesn’t even stop to watch dancers unless they are, say, female and nearly naked.
Which is why it was so weird when he ordered an instructional DVD last year and dragged the whole family into the living room one rainy Saturday to learn the five-minute dance made famous in the “Thriller” music video.
Um. We’re going to do what?
Like everyone our age, he’d been dazzled by Michael Jackson’s creepy, campy, and undeniably boogielicious 1983 mini-movie and its dancing undead. After seeing Jennifer Garner and Andy Serkis (Gollum moonwalks?!) bust the routine in 13 Going on 30 — and watching 1,500 inmates at a Philippines prison nail it on YouTube — he decided no Gen X-er should be without the skill.
Plus he figured if the whole family could whip it out at parties, maybe we’d get invited places. “We just have to have those spooky, kooky Roshells!”
It turns out the instinct isn’t so weird. Okay, it’s weird, but it’s weirdly common.
For four years, people around the world have gathered annually, and at the same exact time, to set world records for the Largest Simultaneous Dance — while doing the “Thriller” routine.
It’s the sort of news that’ll have Grandma pining for the good old days: More unwed couples are living together than ever before, according to a new Census study. The number of shacked-up couples jumped 13 percent in the last year to an all-time high of 7.5 million, and experts say it’s not a decline in morals that’s driving the trend — it’s a drop in income.
The economy, they claim, is spurring unmarried sweethearts to pool their resources in the form of shared rent and utilities.
Which makes sense. It is cheaper to live with your lover. And while I’m technically a love child and thus a terribly unreliable source for conventional relationship advice, I have to tell you that living in sin is also jolly good fun.
When my fella and I first moved in together, I was so utterly enchanted with having him constantly nearby that I followed him from room to room in our tiny apartment.
“Whatcha doin’?” I’d ask.
“Watching the game.”
“Whatcha doin’ now?”
“Untangling these extension cords.”
“How ’bout now?”
“I’m reading, babe, and on a completely unrelated topic, is it going to be like this forever?”
It wasn’t. Adorable quirks (and also mine) have a way of tempering with time. But there’s one aspect of living together that I still haven’t gotten used to, still haven’t learned to love.
