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Author archive for: Starshine Roshell

The Height of My Career

Published by Starshine Roshell on March 26, 2009

I’m not a ginormous person. Not hulking. Not alpine. I couldn’t, like, take down Ann Coulter in a cage fight, although I’d really enjoy trying. But at five-foot-ten and prone to heels, I’m on the lanky side.

Still, I’m astonished how many readers meet me and make this exact comment:

“Wow. You look so much … shorter in your photo.”

I get it all the time. As if it were a perfectly rational thing to say. As if they believed my column mugshot were actual size, and the rest of my body should be six, seven inches tall.

“You’re big,” people inform me. “We thought you were this petite little thing.” They don’t say it in a “Wow, life is full of fun surprises” kind of way. They say it like it’s disconcerting. Like I’ve forever destroyed their ability to trust themselves.

One woman actually held up my book, pointed to the author photo on the back and said to her friend, “Look at her! That’s a small person, I’m sorry.”

The first few times it happened, I let it go. Chuckled, shrugged, tried not to feel like a freak. Maybe squatted a bit, trying to slowly, surreptitiously shrink down to the size folks picture me to be. The size they really, really want me to be.

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The Sob Squawk Screech of Siblings

Published by Starshine Roshell on March 19, 2009

I’m an only child. But I was rarely a lonely child.

My folks would drive half an hour each way to shuttle my school chums to and from our house so I’d have someone to goof around with on weekends. I always thought their jaunts were generous, but now that I’m a parent I realize it was for their benefit as much as mine: An hour of driving is well worth four hours of not having to help me inventory my Hello Kitty pencils and choreograph a dance routine to an entire Go-Go’s album.

When friends weren’t around, I played jacks or skated around the block solo. I dressed Barbie, undressed her and dressed her again, maybe with a winter muff this time. I sat alone in my room transcribing lyrics from my Walkman or playing solitaire. (It sounds sadder than it was.)

I remember once playing Twister by myself. I set up the colorful plastic mat in the living room, where my mother was trying desperately to lose herself in a novel, and I asked if she would mind simply kicking the spinner with her foot as she read, so that I might know where next to plop my left hand, or right foot.

Okay, maybe that one was a little sad.

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The Love Contract

Published by Starshine Roshell on March 12, 2009

Everyone knows you’re not supposed to date your boss. It makes things messy at the office.

I dated mine once, and can attest that things did get messy at the office. Also in the car. And on the sofa at his place.

We flirted. We kissed. We got naked. Shacked up, got married, had kids. Even now, we continue to grope each other in front of the subordinates, open each other’s mail, and answer our home phone singing, “Aloha! Deano’s Weiner Shanty” — all behavior that is really frowned upon in a corporate setting.

Mr. Boss Man and I were in college when we began canoodling among the cubicles, and our tryst failed to raise a ruckus. Some colleagues offered high-fives; others rolled their eyes and made occasional gagging sounds. Most just dismissed us as indiscreet young idiots.

Today, though, employees who date coworkers may be asked to sign a “love contract” declaring their romantic alliance. Known formally as “consensual relationship agreements,” these documents confirm that both parties willingly entered into the affair, and that either one is free to end it without professional ramifications.

I saw one that read, “The undersigned independently and collectively desire to undertake and pursue a mutually consensual social and/or amorous relationship …”

Whew! Makes me hot just reading it.

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Rent's Price of Admission

Published by Starshine Roshell on March 5, 2009

Dirty needles. Cross dressers. Pole dancing. Just another day in the high-school auditorium.

After 12 years of rocking and shocking Broadway, the hit musical Rent is exploding onto high-school stages across America. The New York Times reports that more than 40 schools plan to stage the rock opera this spring. But some parents and principals are squeamish over the show’s racy content, and productions in California, Texas, and West Virginia have been canceled.

The play is actually Rent: School Edition, a somewhat milder version of the original. The profanity has been cut — but the provocative plot remains in tact.

Winner of a Pulitzer Prize and three Tony Awards, Rent is Jonathan Larson’s turn-of-the-21st-Century take on the classic opera La Bohème. It tracks a year in the life of a loose-knit clan of starving artists grappling with poverty, disease, and romance in New York’s East Village.

In La Bohème, the heroine is a frail seamstress suffering from consumption; in Rent, she’s a smack-addicted go-go dancer with HIV. If that’s not enough to get a parent’s trousers in a twist, there are (gasp) gay, bisexual, and transvestite characters.

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Joy is Cheap

Published by Starshine Roshell on February 26, 2009

They warned us: Before long, we’d all feel the effects of this recession. Now it’s happened to me. I haven’t lost my job. No evicted family members have shown up at my door. In truth, the financial crisis hasn’t yet walloped my wallet.

But it’s messing with my mind. Feeling the economy slowly constrict around our national lifestyle, I find myself in a spend-not panic: Would you like to see the dessert menu? Sigh, better not. Valet parking? Don’t be ridiculous.

Call me a brat, but it starts to piss me off. Is this the end of life’s small pleasures? A friend of mine relinquished her daily Starbucks cappuccino (extra shot of espresso, single pump of caramel) in favor of boring, home-brewed joe in a thermos.

“How bad is it,” she lamented, “when a girl can’t even have a little cup of fancy-pants coffee?”

But I had a recent revelation while driving my car and listening to an old song, appropriately, by Squeeze. I was blissing out on those endorphins that come from singing loudly to ’80s music when my guilt-check clicked on: This feels too good. Is it naughty? Is it wasteful, extravagant, thriftless? Am I somehow squandering money that, as soon as next week, could stand between my children and a bowl of pork-flavored ramen noodles?

And then a shocking jolt of relief: No. This euphoria? This is free.

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The Post-Baby Bop

Published by Starshine Roshell on February 19, 2009

It’s the great irony of having children: The very act that launches you into parenthood is difficult to achieve — ever again — once your kid is born.

It’s like nature looks at you and says, “What? You got what you came for. Find another way to jazz up your evenings.”

And it happens to everyone: No matter how much your boudoir tends to bounce before Baby comes along, it slows to a sort of sad, silent stillness (sigh) once the diapers start flying.

“I can’t think of a single couple I know who hasn’t been affected by this issue,” says sex therapist Ian Kerner, a New York husband and father of two.

But he swears there’s hope. In his new book Love in the Time of Colic: The New Parents’ Guide to Getting It On Again, Kerner and co-author Heidi Raykeil say there’s no reason to throw your libido out with the baby’s bath water. “It really is possible,” they write, “to do the hokey pokey and keep up the hanky panky.”

What causes the sexual fizzle between new parents? Exhaustion. Stress. Mom’s hormones, and her tendency to devote every amp of energy and inkling of empathy to the helpless, gurgling humanoid in the bassinet, leaving none for poor, pent-up Dad.

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Stud or Schlub: Lust on the Red Carpet

Published by Starshine Roshell on February 12, 2009

There are certain things a woman is supposed to have accumulated by this point in her life. A signature perfume. A conversation-stopping potluck recipe. And a Hollywood hunk of choice.

I have none of these things, and I spend little time fretting over it. But I must admit that each year at Academy Awards time, I grapple with some shame that I have no favorite man candy to ogle on the red carpet.

I tend to watch the awards shows surrounded by opinionated gal pals and, for the most part, I can holler tasteless comments with the best of them. We gasp and grouse over actresses’ necklines, waistlines, and panty lines. My specialty is the bitchy accessory crack: e.g., “What is that in her hair, a Krispy Kreme?” or “Earrings or necklace, honey, not both.”

It’s when my friends start hooting and gyrating over the bow-tied, limo-emerging actors — bedroom-eyed Clooney, swollen-lipped Pitt, square-jawed Brosnan — that I find myself bored and heading to the kitchen for more artichoke dip.

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The Dirty Truth

Published by Starshine Roshell on February 5, 2009

Freeze! This is the parent police. Drop your Windex and come out with your rubber-gloved hands up.

For years you sponge-happy, spore-hunting moms have shamed the rest of us with your spotless counters and sparkling floors. We don’t know how you did it, you fiendish scrub nuts, but your houses — your very children, even — were always cleaner than ours, ever implying (silently, so silently) that our families were destined to be dingy.

But you can put down your Pledge cans, ladies. Game’s over. Those of us who define “cleaning” as “aiming a Dustbuster” refuse to feel inferior anymore. Science is on our side, baby. SCIENCE!

Researchers are saying that a little dirt in the home, on the hands, or even — gasp! — in your kids’ mouths won’t hurt them. In fact, it’s good for them. It turns out that ingesting the bacteria, viruses, and even (just go with me on this one) intestinal worms found in everyday dirt actually strengthens children’s immune systems, giving them “practice” for more serious germs.

Scientists call this the “hygiene hypothesis.” I call it the “Hallelujah-I’m-not-a-failure finding.” It’s already changed my life.

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