Long before I owned a big velvet couch, I owned an itty-bitty one. Years before I could sweep my front porch with a broom, I could dust it off with a fingertip. And decades before my dining room sparkled under a ponderous chandelier, it glowed under a pee-wee one, about two inches long.
I had a dollhouse. A dazzling, one-of-a-kind dollhouse that my father built for me. A blue two-story Victorian with an Astroturf lawn, white popsicle-stick fence, and working lights — and switches — in every room.
My dad’s a woodcarver, and quite a craftsman. The way he remembers it, I approached him one day with this oh-so-casual remark: “Grandma said you could make me a dollhouse. You couldn’t do that, could you?”
And the game was on.
He called it my “tiny mansion” and worked on it most of the year in his garage, in secret. I recall with breathtaking precision the moment I first saw it: French doors and balconies, old-fashioned wallpaper, buzzing doorbell. A wooden cutting board slid out from the kitchen counter. My initials were carved above the front door in scroll letters.
My dad’s a joy to me. He’s smart and funny and there when I need him. But if he’d never done another kind thing for me — ever in my life — this would have been enough.
Continue reading Dazzling Dollhouse

There are moments in life when you realize you’re different from everyone else. Like fundamentally, even freakishly, different. And that you may never see things the way others do.

I feel that way when people exalt Jack Johnson (I’d yawn if I could summon the energy). Or when they confess that public speaking terrifies them (the mere sight of a podium turns me on). Or when they utter incongruous phrases like, “It’s too sweet for my taste.” (Wha… ?).

Those sentiments don’t fit into the jigsaw puzzle that is my brain. Nor does this one: “Yikes. What happened to your car?”

I hear it a lot. When I pull into a friend’s driveway, see an acquaintance at the gas station, or drive through the school drop-off line.

“Ouch. What happened to your poor car?”

It always takes me a second to figure out what they’re talking about. Then I remember the sizable dent and scrape on the side of my Honda, the result of parking next to a short pole and carelessly slamming into it as I backed out. That was two years ago, and — though the sound it made was otherworldly, causing bystanders to wince and tighten their shoulders up around their earlobes — I’ve scarcely thought of it since. In fact, I only recall it when people gasp and offer heartfelt sympathy, as though it had happened to my face, rather than my fender.

Continue reading Cars Are for Banging

Thoroughly perforated by Puritanism, we Americans are quite sure that if something feels really, really good, it’s probably very, very bad for you. Like shooting smack, watching porn on your boss’s computer, or digging to the bottom of an order of Outback’s Aussie Cheese Fries.

Love affairs are another example. In order to reap the toe-curling rewards of conventional romance — from the shivery intensity of new sex to the unparalleled peace of enduring intimacy — we must also abide the inevitable tedium of monogamy. We must accept and embrace the thrill-sapping sameness that yangs true love’s yin.

Or must we?

A covey of free-thinking, free-loving dissidents is bucking Puritanism, bucking monogamy, and, frankly, bucking anyone else who’s game. They practice what they call “polyamory,” or being openly — and therefore ethically — involved in multiple intimate relationships.

“Poly,” as it’s called for short, encompasses all sorts of consciousness-expanding configurations: from stick-straight to gay-as-the-day-is-long, from married couples with separate-but-not-secret lovers to a trio of adoring roommates who share more than the water bill. It’s not polygamy and it’s not “swinging.” It’s consensual non-monogamy with as much emphasis on love as on sex.

Continue reading Bucking Monogamy

I have betrother’s guilt. It’s like survivor’s guilt but it strikes people who’ve partnered up and gotten hitched, leaving their equally deserving single friends with no one to spoon on frigid nights like these.

And it doesn’t make sense. Why should I be blessed with a guy who turns me on and tolerates my considerable freakiness when so many of my hotter, younger, and far nicer friends are still solo-and-searching?

They tell me Santa Barbara is an especially tricky place to be single. It’s hard to buy even the tiniest home on one income, and with students and retirees weighing down both ends of the population spectrum, the mid-range dating pool is small. “You don’t really want your friend’s sloppy seconds,” adds a friend of mine, “which reduces your odds further.”

The hunt seems to be harder for gals. I’m told our climate and seaside lifestyle leave lots of local fellas with a Peter Pan complex that doesn’t look good on men over age 25. They’re surfers or they’re in a band. Or both.

“Did I tell you about the massage therapist who stood me up on a first date?” one of my girlfriends says. “He was playing beach volleyball and ‘just lost all track of time and forgot.'”

Continue reading Single Ladies Lament

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