Skip to content

Month: March 2014

Drunk Shopping: It's for the Kids!

Five hundred dollars. For wet chocolate. When sobriety surfaced, I literally wept with panic. What had I done?! I had a young kid, a new mortgage, a mediocre salary, and, like, six friends — none of whom were likely to pay $83 each to lap gurgling goo from a humming appliance atop my hand-me-down kitchen table. No, you know how this ends. I took a bath on that chocolate fountain. And possibly … also … in it, but that’s my business. A dozen years and as many auctions later — at Cabarets and Carnivals, through the Enchanted Forest, and aboard the Orient Express — I’ve learned to sip my wine and hide my bid number. But I can’t say I’ve learned to love the annual campus clusterfund that is the school auction.

A Reader Writes My Lead

I had “help” writing this column. At the recent launch party for my newest book of columns, Broad Assumptions, I held a contest inviting guests to submit the first and last lines of a column they’d like me to write — promising that I’d supply the middle part for the winning entry. Twenty-three people wrote suggestions, ranging from “My all-time most embarrassing moment is …” to “Thank God for duct tape!”

The crowd voted on the winner: an exacting couplet by vexingly imaginative reader Hattie Husbands. She won a set of my three books, and I walked away with the lines you see in bold below.

Last Saturday I was sitting in my kitchen sipping my coffee, when suddenly my cat turned and said to me …

“What the furball were you thinking?” my fictitious feline purred. “Writing a column that starts and ends with someone else’s words?! You know very well that you don’t have a cat — don’t even like cats — and certainly wouldn’t be talking to anyone before you’d finished your morning coffee. Meow the hell are you gonna write yourself out of this mess?”

The contents of this site are © 2022 Starshine Roshell. All rights reserved.