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.”

Continue reading Prime-Time Promises

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.

Continue reading Going to Bed Angry

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.

Continue reading Sexile

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.

Continue reading Doing the Right Thing