Category: Columns

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

Prime-Time Promises

Published on December 3, 2009

I grew up in Hollywood. More specifically, on the set of General Hospital, where my dad was a propman. It was an odd place for a girl to come of age. The days were long, the pace was pokey, and I had to be impossibly quiet all the time, literally skittering up into the rafters whenever the child-loathing executive producer marched into the studio unexpectedly.

But there was a part of it I relished: seeing firsthand how phony everything was. On the TV screen at home, Port Charles looked hyper-real and beautiful. But on set, it was so obviously fake. And creepy.

The plastic food was brushed with water to make it glisten. The hunky stars — Rick Springfield and John Stamos — were spackled with spongy, unskin-like makeup. The fog was dry ice. The wine was grape juice. And the front of each character’s stately home was a flimsy plywood facade that wobbled if you leaned on it.

Throughout several sitter-less summers, I became a connoisseur of these idiot-box illusions. Which makes it all the more embarrassing that I recently got sucked into Tinseltown’s manipulation machine, bamboozled by the promise of prime-time prominence.

A friend in the biz was passing my book around to industry nabobs when a reputable TV producer reportedly fell sick-in-love with my “voice” and asked me to “take a meeting.”

Parenting by Committee

Published on November 26, 2009

There are things I do well. The Pony, for instance. I can dance a Pony to make white go-go boots blush. Also: Whistle. I’m a sick whistler. Crazy. I can’t think of anything else just now but there are definitely — surely — things I’m really, really good at.

Rare, though, is the moment I feel proficient at parenting. It’s not false modesty when I say the task just doesn’t come naturally to me; sometimes I have to fight my most basic instincts to keep from earning the Abominable Mommy of the Year award (and if you feel this way, too, I’d love to hear from you; if you don’t, please keep it to yourself).

So when my 11-year-old got mad at the television remote last weekend and flung it across the living room, accidentally assassinating his dad’s new flatscreen TV — the only TV in our house, during (oh god) football season — I wasn’t sure what to do.

We didn’t witness the crime; he did it right before leaving for a friend’s house. His little brother ratted him out. The good news was we had time to thoughtfully plot a response rather than reacting to the emotions flooding our guts and skittering across our faces: shock, disappointment, and a frustration that teetered on rage — the same feeling that had cracked the darn screen to begin with and thus proven an ineffective problem-solver.

Going to Bed Angry

Published on November 19, 2009

I did it. I went to bed angry. They tell you not to, but I did. And I lived to tell the tale.

We were in bed, having one of those “Why can’t you just say the right thing?”/”Why can’t you just tell me what to say?” arguments, when my eyes began stinging from lack of sleep. So I shut them. Just for a second, just to rest. But I maintained a fabulously formidable scowl to show my opponent that our spat was still very much in play.

I woke up seven hours later — scowling — and even more outraged than I’d been the night before. The row was unresolved and now we had broken the cardinal rule of couplehood, too; no good could come of this …

It was only weeks ago, while lunching at Stella Mare’s, that we got to chatting with an elderly couple sitting near us. Holding hands and beaming like the stars of a Cialis commercial, they told us their “secret”: “Never go to bed angry.”

Seriously? I thought. That’s it? That lame old saw? I’d never really understood the adage because I never go to bed angry. I can’t. To me, going to bed mad means I’ve lost the argument. Which is something I don’t do willingly.

Baby Einstein Refunds

Published on November 12, 2009

Whenever I think I’m doing a decent job of raising my kids, something happens to convince me that I am, in fact, profoundly inept at the job.

Most recently it was the news that the Baby Einstein company is offering refunds to anyone who bought its DVDs in the last five years. Here’s why: Turns out the show doesn’t actually make kids any smarter.

I know. It’s shocking. Next they’ll tell us that Froot Loops are NOT actually part of a nutritious breakfast, and that sparing the rod does NOT in fact spoil the child. Where will the madness end?

The Einstein videos — and the Baby Beethovens, da Vincis, and Wordsworths that make up the whole lofty-tot series — have long been promoted as educational, said to stimulate babies’ brains. But a child advocacy group called the claims untrue and threatened Disney with a class-action lawsuit, citing studies that prove such shows actually delay language development.

In other words, the more they see, the less they know. Which is sort of how I feel about my parenting skills.

Confession: I’m one of the lousy moms who strapped her infants into their no-escape high-chairs, pushed them in front of the television and popped in a Baby Mozart video. I did it with frequency and I did it with confidence, believing for no good reason that the images of low-budget puppets nodding to sonatas would spark synapses in my boys’ burgeoning, Harvard-bound brains.

Because it was either that or my well-worn copy of The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

Sexile

Published on November 5, 2009

It wasn’t even sunrise when I felt nature’s call. Clad in my usual sleepwear — yesterday’s T-shirt, unfussy undies — I stumbled half-dreaming from my twin bed toward the loo and stopped cold as I shuffled past my roommate’s bed in the opposite corner of the narrow room.

Was that a hairy arm hanging out of the bed? Was that a man’s sleeping body entwined with that of my sacked-out roommate, only inches from my barely garbed, bathroom-bound bladder?

He hadn’t been there when I went to sleep. What had happened in here? Scratch that. I didn’t want to know. Could I possibly go back to sleep a mere feet from this rather attractive stranger? And if I left the room in my skivvies, how long before they’d clear out and I could return?

Tufts University drew nationwide shrugs and sniggers last month when it issued an edict to students: “You may not engage in sexual activity while your roommate is present in the room.”

It’s funny. It is. But finding somewhere to bump bodies in college really is an exacting task. I remember breaking into empty dorm rooms and, once, climbing onto a campus rooftop. Not safe. Not smart. Not especially sanitary.

The Playdate Secret

Published on October 29, 2009

I’m a big fan of the Cheap Trick: the itty bitty effort that packs an impressive punch. The trifling gesture that draws the sort of “ooh”s and “ahh”s you never have, and never will, deserve.

But I’ve mastered so few of them. I can’t make a three-ingredient crowd-wowing cake, or sweep my hair into a head-turning up-do with the flick of a wrist. I’ve never even figured out how to rock those cool ribbon embellishments atop a wrapped present.

I have one great trick, though. And to make up for the undue kudos it nets me, I’m going to share it with you.

The next time a friend complains of being overtired, overwhelmed, and over-worked, put your hand on her shoulder and say, “Why don’t you drop your kids at my house this afternoon for a play date, and take a few hours for yourself?”

And say it like you mean it. Like the idea doesn’t terrify you. Because here’s the crazy thing, the dirty little secret about having other children over to your house: It’s actually easier than not having them.

Doing the Right Thing

Published on October 22, 2009

They say guilt is a great motivator, but I’m unconvinced. If it were true — if disgrace and penitence could spur a gal to stand up and set things right — then I wouldn’t be lying here, curled around my atrophying wallet in a shade-grown, grass-fed, phosphate-free paralysis.

I’m lame with eco-shame.

Do I read too much? Do I pay too much attention? Am I the only one confused and incapacitated by knowing the fiendish ways that every product on the market will impact our health, environment, and the progress of global human rights? Pesticides, PVCs, bioengineering. I’m afraid to consume anything for fear I might ingest E. coli, support sweatshops, or single-handedly deplete a rain forest.

I’m not one of those “let someone else figure out global warming; I loves me some Styrofoam” people, I swear I’m not. I’m conscientious-ish. I buy organic milk, free-range eggs, fair-trade coffee. I pack my kids’ lunches in re-purposed hummus tubs instead of landfill-bound, petroleum-based sandwich baggies. I confess I still don’t know what “sustainable” means, but I compost kitchen scraps for garden mulch. I even lease solar panels for my roof.

Infernal Artwork

Published on October 15, 2009

The women who guide my son through preschool are more evolved human beings than I am. They have unlimited capacity for appreciating his every tiny accomplishment, every endearing utterance, every minor scribbling, and random stroke of a glue stick.

They send home stick sculptures and pudding paintings, stencil sketches, and piles of scraps that he spent the morning snipping with safety scissors.

I make the requisite fuss at pick-up: “Wow! Look what you did! You’ve been busy! What a cool … submarine-dog?” But stumbling to the car, arms full, I begin to panic. Where is all this delightful-evidence-of-self-expression supposed to GO?

I resent the mountain of masterpieces that amasses on my kitchen counter daily; there, I said it. Since sentimentality breeds clutter, I’ve tried approaching the problem with pure pragmatism, but it taught me this: The saddest eight words in the English language are “Mommy, why is my drawing in the trash?”

It’s true. I’m going to hell. But I won’t be alone.

“We have a daughter who is prolific,” Northern California mom Kat McDonald told me. “Anything left behind in the car I throw away. I usually have to shred it because our daughter will cull the trash.”

Some moms toss the stuff when the kids are on vacation. Jennifer Untermeyer of Colorado does it after they’ve gone to bed. “I feel a tiny bit guilty,” she said, “but it passes after a glass of wine.”

Welcome to the Gun Show

Published on October 8, 2009

I spend my life hunting for exercise in disguise — activities that will hasten my heart rate and tone my tail feathers without me much noticing. Too aggro for yoga, too wussy for … well, anything that hurts, I need to be tricked into fitness. I need it to just sort of happen while I’m living my otherwise delightful and not especially active life.

Which is why my friend Margaret suggested we spend a nice evening chasing one another around in the dark, trying to kill each other dead.

Margaret is not a scary person. She’s an erudite English professor and cookie-baking mommy who happens to have a jones for laser combat. For months, she has been begging me to join her at Motionz laser tag in Santa Maria for their weekly Lasercise night (wha … ?) and when I run out of excuses, I gather my up-for-anything gal pals Kate and Kalai and bite the bullet. Or rather nibble the bright red beam.

On the drive up, we giggle and snort as Margaret briefs us Spandex-clad suburbanites on Lasercise procedure. Clad in high-tech, sensor-laden vests and wielding bad-ass light-launching weaponry, we will do calisthenics then play back-to-back laser-tag games in Motionz’s two-story indoor war zone. The object is simple: Shoot people, and don’t get shot.

Gloss of Innocence

Published on October 1, 2009

I’m not a spiritual person. But now and again I go down on my knees to thank the Almighty Creator of Y Chromosomes for not giving me a daughter.

I do this when Miley Cyrus performs a concert 100 miles away for $70 per ticket. And when I drive past the perpetual line of impatient preteens at Pinkberry yogurt after school. And when I see a 12-year-old peeking out from beneath makeup so thick it would make Katy Perry blush. Even if you couldn’t tell.

With teen idols like Demi Lovato and Avril Lavigne rockin’ blackout raccoon eyes, how can a tween resist the call to paint her peepers and lacquer her lips? And how do moms decide when it’s okay to wear makeup?

“My daughter thinks we’re cruel for not letting her wear eyeliner,” says one mother of a 12-year-old. “She says, ‘Mom, all the 8th graders wear it!’ It’s hard. You don’t want them to feel left out, but you still want to stand your ground. I’m not walking around with some mod-looking makeup-caked girl.”

It seems there’s an unspoken but widely accepted cosmetics continuum.

“You start slow — clear lip gloss in early junior high — then maybe some neutral eyeshadow by eighth grade,” says a mother of two grown girls. “The idea is to make them THINK they are wearing makeup when really, you can’t tell.”