Gossip pages

Oh, China. It's Sharon Stone. Please. She had a few good movie roles, and a lot of lousy ones. We don't take her seriously. She is famous for flashing her wibbles, having a husband who had his foot gnawed on by a Komodo dragon, wearing fur, and, uhh. . . No, that's it.

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Quote of Note: Jossip. I enjoy their weekly sound bite round up. "Enjoy" is the wrong word, since I wince at every one. What's the combination of "painful" and "enjoyment," laugh/wince = Lince? Waaff?

Today's choicey bit?

“A good soufflé and a good blow job is all you need to get a man, I think.”
— Bethenny, Real Housewives of New York City: The Lost Footage



And I think if you equate blow jobs to overblown (see what I did there?) baked custards, you are so not invited to my key party.

See, I think we have the whole man v. woman thing in miniature. Or, okay, maybe Uptight Wealthy Botoxed Republican v. absolutely everyone else. Stereotypical as it totally, utterly may be, I do believe that only someone who willingly allows herself to be deemed a "Real Housewife of New York City" would think that any man, gay, straight or Aiken, has a baked custard dessert and that special WaySuperHappyGrownUpPrivateThing as equally weighted deal clinchers. Get one right and for the other, dear hostess, your guest will be more than happy with generic, individually wrapped, 7-11 fruit pies.

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Okay, here I am gossiping about people I don't know. That's honestly rude. It's only fair that I tell you something trashy about me, then, right? Hmmm.

How about this? I have a jug of dead dog ashes in my closet.

You?

Not green, but puce

I gots me The Covets something bad. Writers who are NotMe have nice, fat book deals and everyone Who is NotMe is skinnier and happier than I am, and they all, also, sport one-of-a-kind pieces of jewelry and are about to buy any one of the many lovely houses, for sale, where I want to live, and for which I do not have teh monehs.

It's not only that I have slugs coming under the kitchen door at night.

Oh, yes, I really, really do.

But it is partially that.

Google any variation on slugs in my kitchen and you get a slew of hits, most in the UK. This does not make me feel better. Cosmopolitan, yes. Less squigged out, no.

So, tonight, I carefully laid out a thick line of salt to stop them, not to burn them - my own Wiccan clearing by the cat fud.

I don't know the ritual or mineral with which to repel covetousness.

Oh, wait.

Playing Ball

Dear Fifty-something-year-old Fan Man,

You'll think I don't understand, but I do. Oh, I really, really do. I lived in Massachusetts for more than twenty years. Celtics. Patriots. Red Sox. Bruins. You know them and you love them, or people will throw your ass out of the car somewhere between Sharon and Worcester, at 3 a.m., in late February. During an ice storm.

So, when we stopped, my young children and I, at the In-And-Out burger in San Mateo, I understand that our (opposing team) Red Sox hats jarred you. You had, like us, sat in the sun for some four hours. Perhaps you partook of a hearty $9 draft beverage, or two. And maybe the movement of my eight-year-old son, galloping cheerfully to our car, enraged you, not unlike the way movement upsets a bull. Even though your team won.

When you slammed your team's baseball cap against the picture window as if you were thrusting out your middle finger, I started to laugh. Though the way you exposed it at me, angry and full-frontal, was pure primate behavior (as if showing me that you had huge balls), what really caught my eye was your expensive, silk-screened tee shirt. "Jesus," it read, "Is the Way and the Light!"

It may not have occurred to you, but as spectators and not actually active members of our opposing teams, what each team does only needs affect our lives oh, so tangentially. It's called "playing" and it's called a "game" for a reason. And while we witnessed the game, we were not, you and I, actually involved. At all. We ate ice creams and checked email and stood in bathroom lines and maybe slapped a back or two - and that was the extent of it. Really. Feel free to downgrade that adrenaline level at any time.

And afterwards? We're not required, even if we are the most passionate fans ever, to scare small children with our post-game vehemence. It's still okay to say things like "Good game!" and "What a crowd!" and "Wow. Those twelve dollar garlic fries sure sucked, didn't they?"

Besides, everyone knows Baby Jesus totally hates your team.

Barbara

Ode to Adam Sandler

No.

A Quick Look at Ground-breaking Emo Males as Pop Cultural Icons

James Dean
I fully believe Jimmy would have flat ironed his hair, and you know he already had the eyeliner and black nail polish in a drawer.

Patrick Swayze.

What?

Swayze is a hybrid - he's a Square-jaw/Wounded. I was too old to think he was hot in "Dirty Dancing," where he played a pre-Emo - an emotionally damaged, Jordan Catalano, if Jordan Catalano was all jazz hands and 15 years of hard drinking made him look at least 39 in full sunlight.

But I got it. In both "Dirty Dancing" and "Ghost," he was cast right. He wasn't a great (or very good) actor, but he had a vulnerability that read clearly on screen.

And then he showed that he did have a thing, and that thing was more complicated than a flipped up collar and peg jeans; that thing kicked ass in "Donnie Darko."

Jared Leto
I was way too old to be attracted to Jared Leto when he showed up in "My So-Called Life." And yet, omgsqeee! I was all 14 again. He was so good-looking, and so, so emotionally unavailable. That combination, we know, crosses all cultural divides.

Too bad he's actually an ass.


Johnny Depp
If only he wasn't only two-thirds size.

Who rides in the Emo Float for 2008? Your votes, please.

Oh, come on!

The best part of going to film school? The professors. My Film 401 guy was an LA-expat - an older, grizzled, experienced producer/director with lots of stories and a full-blown daytime drinking problem. He'd screen classic movies for us and we'd break down the whatevers and eventually the class would devolve into his sipping from his coffee mug and telling stories.

He talked candidly about beauty in Hollywood; his kid was an actor, okay, but not hugely talented. Quite good looking by "regular people" standards, he was planning to have a minor nose job and some other work done because on film, he needed to have a more generic, chiseled look to get to the level he wanted. And his dad talked about it as a necessary step if he wanted to work film rather than stage.

I was older than anyone else I my class; I was in my late twenties, married, working full-time. I had a more refined bullshit detector than they did, simply by virtue of being old. Prof and I had long talks about plot points and God knows what else; he declined to do more than drunkenly skim my term papers. "I'm sure it's fine. You know this," he'd say and put his feet up and start another story about who was closeted in Hollywood and who was doing what drugs, my paper tossed to the side.

I suddenly realized how hard he was working to appear hip the day he screened for us the John Ford movie, "The Searchers." It's considered a classic Western, but when John Wayne discusses how his now-teenaged niece, surely wedded to one of her captors and therefore so sullied she should be killed, the class was outraged. They went nuts. Prof was stunned; it never occurred to him that part was now un-PC and could (and did) violently alientate them from Wayne's character. The world had changed.

He stopped the movie and said as much. "You guys are young," he said. "You missed what an icon John Wayne was." He paused and sipped from his coffee mug.

The class grumbled and shifted, not appeased.

"Although, there is this one thing," he said, smiling slightly, "You know John Wayne's characteristic swagger, that butt-clenched walk?"

"You know where that came from?"

Everyone waited. I waited. I watched his face. He was, by God, going to win them back.

"Just before a scene, he'd stick a tiny pine cone up his ass."

Hair and business

I have super thin, curly hair. It looks like crap pretty much all the time. In high school, before it changed from thick 'n' wavy to thin, sad 'n' curly, I used to wear a smooshing down hat on my walk to school. I'd remove the hat just as I finished my mile trudge and hit school grounds. Because when you are 15, you care far too much. Flat, post-hippy hair was the goal. Now I just want to not scare myself when I walk past reflective surfaces.

I once had a boss who had Tourette's and refused to acknowledge it. I'm not sure he knew. His one strong, repetitive tic was a shoulder shrug while talking and it took Herculean (Wonder Womanly?) effort on my part to decipher, depending on the conversation, whether he was wound up or he wanted me to know he was genuinely blasé about how I developed the PowerPoint presentation.

He asked me in the job interview, as one of those questions, what weakness I had, and I said something about my hair being out of control. I was 22. He laughed and offered me the job. What the hell, twenty-two-year-old me? That was so flippant and gross. What the hell?

Hair and work just go together. There was the job where the human resources person called me nappy-headed and then explained how her people would one day destroy Israel. She was best drinking buddies with the head of HR, so there was no one, really, to go tell. Also, she had several assault convictions, so I think maybe they already knew that she had Issues.

She also would lock herself in the lunch room and chant "I hate those mother f)ckers" at her salad.

No, please, do not mediate my grievance.

It's hot here. The West Coastians are limp and whining, Oh, it's so hot. We’re so hot. Ye gods, but it is hot! And I try to refrain from going all old man/high-waisted pants on them, You don't know from hot! In Boston, we had humidity! Here you have a nice, dry heat! Oy, you don't know from the dampness! Instead I just slam a hand on my frizzy, frizzy hair and look sympathetic.

I'm in loooooooooove with a girl

Fluid Pudding



And she writes a little, too.

Putting the "cra(p)" in Crafty

"Oh," says my son, Friday night, around 9 p.m., "I need slippers for [the school play on] Monday. Old-fashioned ones."

Saturday:
Target's slipper cupboard was bare
Sears, alas, also had none
Mervyn's shoe department simply sneered.
Amazon.com? Why, yes! Huzzah! Please, to enjoy our $35 sheepskin slippers, plus our $20 shipping. I could not do it. I could not.

Aha! I shall (the one who glues together Halloween costumes due to an utter inability to sew with needle and thread) sew slippers! On Sunday! While also on deadline and being feted as the stretch marked, strung out, saggy mother I am.


So, I did.


They are like wee plaid potato bags, the slippers he trotted off with this morning. The whole hook-and-loop thing did not work, nor did holding out a handful of safety pins and wishing him much luck. At midnight, I was stabbing at some bits of raffia left over from my holiday wrapping spree (4% of which may or may not go to school fundraising!) so he could tie them closed to fit 'round his wee ankles.

They won't last twenty earnest multi-purpose media room minutes. You know it. I know it. The parents watching the play know it; they'll set their Blackberrys by the unraveling of the clashing thread.

"One must let one's children starve, metaphorically speaking," says my friend, a writer. She's not a mother. "You must give them less to give your art more."

I call bullshit. It's not that easy.

I don't want to be a "Sunday Writer," someone who dabbles, the rueful mom who always wanted to write That Book. Who signs up for that? Would I have rather been working on my novel?

Yes.

And yet . . .

My kid needed goddamn slippers - ones without a Disney icon on the toe. I tried to go the easy route and buy them. I could have said, "Nope. Sorry, Kid. My need to work on my book trumps your need to feel like your edges are square this week."

I can't do that. Who can?

And yet, while I don't let them starve - sometimes, crappy drive-thru food on the way home from Little League means I can hit the computer as soon as we get home. That thirty minutes of writing time, of "me" time, while they watch "iCarly" and eat transfats, is what saves me from therapy and vodka.

Well, therapy, anyway.

Now it's Monday morning and I'm all Craft Hungover. I can't even think about a glue gun without triggering my gag reflex.

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Have you seen "Kiss Kiss Bang Bang" yet? No? We need to talk.

Happy hunting

Some become giddy when they smell blood.

In our house, there are many mansions

Discover

Why my head hurts

"I am not a monster," said the man. "I could have killed them and no one would ever have known."

Oh, man, did we overreact! Wow. I'm so embarrassed.

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HATE CRIME

"At 9:45 p.m. on May 1, 2008, two male suspects posted fliers at a McDonalds in the 7900 block of Van Nuys Boulevard in Van Nuys. The flyers were made to look authentic correspondence from McDonalds, and stated that due to a string of robberies, African American customers are now required to pay an additional fee of $1.50 per transaction. Police were trying to get fingerprints off the fliers to see if they could identify the suspects."
Thanks to The Subliterate Cinephile!

Theeeriously?! A Hate Crime?

See, my first thought is that it was a stupid ('n' tasteless) prank, or perhaps some performance art. Some wealthy white college kids were "Showing the Up the Inherent Racism Prevalent Even In Our Fast Food Culture" (for independent study credit).

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And this made my head unhurt:

This year is a good year to spot whale migration along the Central Coast. I didn't know that when I went down to the water's edge, so when I saw the gray whale breach and the many spouts, less than a mile offshore, it was even more magical than if I had expected it (and even when you do expect it, seeing a whale is pretty damned magical).

I was standing there on the bluff, leaning against the railing, when a hideous clattering made me turn around. Walking up to join me was a girl, maybe five years old, in striped leggings and a crazy pattered dress - she was prints and plaids in pinks and oranges, with messy hair and some smudged face painting on one cheek. She dragged behind her a red, six-foot dog leash, and tied to the very end of that leash was a Breyer horse, a Bay Quarter Horse, to be exact, which lay on one side, getting the crap utterly slammed out of it as it was dragged along the asphalt walkway.

"Do you see whales?" she asked.

"I did earlier, " I said. "I'm looking for more."

She nodded. We stood quietly together.

"Hey!" She pointed to the cliffs nearby, where a dog waited for his surfing owner to come back to him.

"There's a Golden Retriever!"

This again?!

My Dr. Phil piece garnered so many comments that MSN gave them an entire site of their own.

This quote may go on my new business cards:

"Barbara Atkinson obviously is a liberal with an ax to grind."
Actually, it's a chainsaw. You know how we liberal gals like our power tools.

or this one:

"Perhaps if Dr. Phil began promoting moral relativism, abortion, gay marriage and promiscuity, Atkinson would approve."
Can this guy read my mind or what? My very first thought upon waking this morning was that abortion gets such a bad rap.

or this one:

"Ms. Atkinson has an issue with advice or practicality."
Truer words were never typed.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm off to work on my "Encourage two gay marriages, get one abortion free!" campaign. That darned liberal agenda ain't gonna push itself.

Let Them Eat Cake

Lewis Black is touring.



This not Lewis Black. This is John Bowman, the opener, and said Mr. Bowman kicked ass. While holding and vaguely strumming a ukulele.

He looks teeny and far away, but I'll have you know that I was a mere eight rows from his utterly foul language. No, really, someone yelled at him to use "civility" because he spoke some grown up words.

I have never before been to any performance with hecklers, and then I was. And, oh, it's even worse than you think. It's horrible. All you want to do is get out of your seat and find the person yelling at the performer (as if they were in their living room in their gray underpants with the stuffed ferret on the coffee table), and throttle them. And even when it stops, you spend the entire rest of the performance waiting for it to start again.

I thought people whispering behind me in a movie theater made me crazy. This was stroke-inducing.

I watched (on YouTube) comics being heckled and how they responded. The most vicious was perhaps Joe Rogan (not known, in general, for classy behavior, but he did stop short of going all Michael Richards), but how can you fault a performer who responds however they want towards some stranger who is hiding in the dark, trying to ruin their act?



Hecklers should be thrown out by venue staff, unless it's a response to something said by Borat.

When Lewis Black has a microphone and gets upset (and he gets upset often), the sound of his voice - the one or two carefully chosen words used for punctuation and effect - goes directly from his vocal cords into the very center of your brain, where there is a small empty space the size of a walnut. And then the noise, it slams itself around in there like a furious, hungover, rabid weasel, until you begin to bleed internally.

But not in a bad way.

I have a picture, pinned to my wall

I will admit, grudgingly, that I attended a Thompson Twins concert. Once. I bought tickets as a gift for a friend and the second half of my gift was that I attended said concert with her. And maybe sang along, quietly, to myself. For moral support.

So it didn't puncture any preconceived Fan Bubbles for me to see that Twin Two, now known as "Miss Pokeno," has moved on. Indeed, I have developed grown up tics, too, including eating a wholesome breakfast and regularly pulling my hair out of my face.

Nowhere does it mention if she can actually upholster and develop the chair frame, or if she buys them pre-made and just shoves some squirrels inside. I wanted to know about the chair-making part. Is she all about the brass tacks, or what?

"One of the most shocking items is a chaise longue with a dead swan attached to the armrest. According to the principles of armchair destructivism, the dead animals' function is to unsettle the familiar association of furniture with relaxation."

Twin Two calls it "a collection of chairs to honor the godless."

Uhh, thanks.

(But just for future reference? We godless now also accept PayPal.)

Friday Nite Lite

Work sucks.

I don't mean the actual work. I big basket of kittens like my job. Pay me to write? Pay me to edit? Pay me AND be smart and nice AND point me towards a fridge full of FREE Diet Pepsi?

We've all been places where the air was tangy with fear, loathing and hungover salespeople. This ain't that. I didn't know companies that were fun and exciting existed after 2000. If they start making Monica Lewinsky jokes, I will get back in the time machine tout suite.

So, it's good. However, that traditional New Job Terror has infected most corners of my life. I worry if I am doing an okay job and what I should be doing and should not be doing and if the Diet Pepsi runs out. The NJT (New Job Terror) isn't leaving me much time to tell stories. That is how work sucks. Also, I have to put on pants.

I can take a moment to share with you one of my pressing concerns:

Tina Fey.

She's fabulously funny, smart, and comes across as a little too self-depreciating (but still able to pull her shit together enough to be hugely successful, so maybe she's not actually so self-loathing? Maybe she's doing a thing so people don't hate her success? In any case, well-played, Tina. Well-played). And cool. Who here does not want to have her baby? Show of hands?

But, I fear we are quickly reaching Fey Saturation Level Orange. "30 Rock" plus "Baby Mama" plus the covers of Xghtouynfmfnfty Magazine all may cause the public to overdose on her like so many Saturday night Beer/Ice Cream/Frito binges. And also? Amy Poehler is coming up fast on her heels. Watch your back, Tina, and go back under the radar a little, is all I'm saying.

If, the next time I swing by BK for a grease-and-beef-broth flavored, watered down fountain drink, I see an ad for a "Baby Mama" action figure (now with pregnancy test and Fossil bag accessories!), I'm taking my Alec Baldwin and going home.