Starshine Roshell
Writer & Columnist | Santa Barbara, CA
There’s a man I meet for enchanting lunch dates. We giggle and taste each other’s food. He stands up when I enter the room, and looks me frankly in the eyes. He’s inexcusably handsome, laugh-out-loud funny, and whip-smart.
And when I leave for our rendezvous — wearing a smile, a flirty dress, and a spritz of mango body splash — my husband always comments, “Wow. Who are you having lunch with again?” When I answer, he says, “Oh! Have fun.”
You see, my delicious date is gay. Gay as they come. Dresses-better-than-I-do gay. Big-fan-of-chick-flicks gay. I fancy myself the Grace to his Will. The Madonna to his Rupert. (But not the Carrie to his Stanford. He’s not that gay.)
Apparently I am a fag hag. But I find the term tasteless-times-two, so I go by the gentler, more fashionable “fruit fly.” (The zeitgeist now also allows for “lesbros,” or straight men who covet the company of lesbians. A column for another time, no doubt.)
Lots of my girlfriends have cherished friendships with gay men, and the gay part isn’t incidental. These guys are not “girlfriends with penises.” There’s something about the breezy straight gal/gay guy dynamic that makes other friendships feel like hard labor.
Families are noisy. On any given day, put your ear to the front door of a family home and you’ll hear a predictable soundtrack: laughing, whining, stomping, hollering.
But none of these sounds rumble through my house. Rather, they may, but I can’t hear them. Because I can’t hear anything but this: Thwappety thwappety thwappety BAM! BAM! BAM!
My son is a drummer. An enthusiastic one. With beefy forearms and a double bass pedal.
Boogety boogety boogety CRASH! BASH! CRASH!
The kid, I’m just saying, is LOUD.
I remember the ultrasound when we first heard his heartbeat: a soft thub-thub, thub-thub, thub-thub. It was at once startling and reassuring, familiar yet miraculous.
But once he was born, the only thing that would soothe this colicky baby was a rolling groove. Swinging, bouncing, walking. Funk music, disco, reggae.
Then a sadistic relative (you know who you are) gave him a Fisher-Price drum set. Why he took to it, and not his Elmo guitar or toy piano, we may never know. Before long, another sadistic relative (it’s a genetic thing) eventually helped him buy a full-scale, take-up-half-the-garage, gleaming chrome drum set.
I was pretty sure I was bitchin’. Dope on a rope. Wicked hip. I was fairly certain I had “badass” scrawled all over me. Then last week I met the roller derby chicks.
Half-scrambling, half-gliding around a no-frills rink in a concealed corner of Earl Warren Showgrounds, the Mission City Brawlin’ Betties learned me that there’s cool — and then there’s roller-derby cool. And while I may take the occasional lap around the former, I will never so much as accidentally roll downhill into the latter. That’s cooler than a polished concrete flat track in the shade. That’s cool on wheels.
I’m no slouch on skates. An only (lonely) child, I spent entire Hollywood weekends shooting the moon in hot pink denim. So when a couple of girlfriends told me they were trying out for Santa Barbara’s new roller derby team, I strutted over to check it out.
Invented in the 1930s, roller derby is a full-contact sport in which knee-padded, hot-pants’d gals race each other around an oval track at break-bone speed, trying to block opponents from passing them. It was huge in the ’70s, selling out arenas like Madison Square Garden, and has enjoyed a recent revival, with more than 75 leagues across the country. Drew Barrymore’s much-anticipated derby flick Whip It opens in October.
It’s that time of year once again, to vote for your favorite Santa Barbara people, places and things in the Independent’s Best of SB Readers’ Poll. So if you happen to have a favorite local columnist (wink wink), please cast your vote!
I fantasize about it all year. The week when my kids go to Grandpa’s house five hours away, and my husband and I get rare, rapturous grown-up time. The luxury of sleeping late. The freedom of going to a movie on a whim. The enchanting silence and shocking simplicity of tidying up the house — and having it stay tidy. Day after day after day.
I crave it. I treasure it. I deserve it.
But when the time finally comes for our boys to drag their duffle bags out the door, I’m faced with a disturbing revelation: Greater than my need to be temporarily childless is my children’s need to be briefly, blissfully motherless.
You see, it turns out I’m a terrible shrew. A nagging control freak. A micro-managing ogress from the soggiest bog of Vex-and-Pester Swamp. As my kids prepare to leave, I chase them around the house like a cartoon mother, wagging a bony index finger and barking orders:
Did you pack your swimsuit? I know I already asked you, but last time you forgot it, so let’s be sure. How do you plan on practicing your drums without your drumsticks? Be sure to wear sunscreen every day. And shower once in a while, for goodness’ sake. Here’s a plastic bag for your laundry; please don’t make Grandpa pick up your dirty clothes every night.
Times are lean. Money’s tight. Something’s gotta give. Surveys show women are cutting back on their beauty regimens to save dollars: painting their own nails, giving up facials, and stocking up, alas, on Clairol Root Touch-Up in Medium Golden Blonde.
“The economy,” one of my girlfriends confessed, “is wreaking havoc on my nails and hair.”
But not all hair.
I’m always amused at how women’s and men’s pubic hair styles change with the times. In the ’70s, the pages of Playboy were overgrown with va-jungles. Today the Best Razor for Manscaping Below the Belt is being pushed as hard as BBQ’s used to be. With the preference of centerfolds looking like nursing mothers up top and nine-year-old girls below. Skin, as they say, is in.
Gals of all ages seem to favor the Brazilian wax, which cannot be explained adequately without violating obscenity laws. But I’ll try: The waxer removes every flipping follicle on the waxee’s, um, undercarriage, up her backside, and anything (or everything) she wants taken off in front. Landing strip. Triangle. Cougar paw. Or need-a-muff naked.
Since fashion spins in cycles, one has to wonder: How soon before the pube pendulum swings back from bare to bushy? What will it take to end the trend toward hairless hoo-has?
Continue reading Is Waxing Waning?
Starshine will be on a Women’s Lit panel at the Ventura Book Festival with Harley Jane Kozak from “Parenthood.” SUPER hilarious. It’s a free event right on the beach.
Saturday, July 25, 2009
11:30 a.m.
Crowne Plaza Hotel
Ventura, CA
It starts like this. You’re chatting with your kid when a familiar phrase pops into your head. A line of dialogue from a favorite movie of your youth. “Eat my shorts” from The Breakfast Club, perhaps, or “Son, you got a panty on your head” from Raising Arizona. Maybe you’re calling the family to the dinner table, Junior is unresponsive and you find yourself blurting, “Bueller? … Bueller? … Bueller? …”
Then you realize, with a cold blast of horror, that your child has no idea what you’re talking about. No frame of reference through which to recognize your superior cinematic literacy.
How can this be? (And this is where the faulty thinking begins.) No offspring of yours is going to go through life without studying the classics, without paying proper deference to the heroes of your adolescence, the big-screen giants whose vast wisdom and extraordinary wit shaped your psyche: Mel Brooks. Eddie Murphy. Long Duk Dong.
So you rent a movie, tell your kid, “You’re gonna LOVE this” and plop down on the couch for a family movie night. Which is exactly when the cursing begins. And the full-frontal nudity. And the powder-snorting, pole-dancing, cop-killing and flagrant cracking of jokes so racist they actually make your jaw clench.
People, what the (rated R for language) were you thinking?