I’ve been on summer vacay, professionally known as a hiatus, but even fun in the sun couldn’t distract me from the Mel Gibson debacle calling to me from supermarket checkout lines to the evening news to family dinner conversations.

He’s a beast, isn’t he? Rage, mixed with misogyny and racism is just too grotesque to be ignored. What do you think we should do about it? Ban him from “The View?” Applaud that his talent agency has kicked him to the curb? Go easier on those Russian spies, to show solidarity to Oksana Grigorieva, his baby mama? Torch his homes? Start recording all our distasteful private conversations for future evidence? MORE ›

Here’s my question: What took them so long? Think about it: the Gores are two dynamic, intelligent and passionate people who have met everyone and been everywhere. Their lives have been filled with options and inspirations, seductions and distractions. Who wouldn’t be tempted to wonder what it would be like to rewrite their Third Act? After 40 years of marriage, it could feel like the commutation of a death sentence… I’m just saying.

Oh wait! I’m not supposed to say that, am I? The national dialogue is trending toward shock and disappointment at the Gore’s news. Not me. Call me a cynical recent divorcee if you want, but I think they are both very courageous and clear-eyed in their decision to separate. Not only that, but I don’t think either of them will live to regret the decision, hard as the transition will be. MORE ›

Last Friday, I titled my blog, “We’ll Remember Always, Graduation Day” and was told several times by readers that I needed to clean up my syntax. Really?? Doesn’t anyone remember the Beach Boys’ cover of a song that was first made popular by my mother’s heartthrobs, the Four Freshmen? It’s a song title, people!

So, for those of you who may have taken a pop cultural nap over the last twenty years, “Smells Like Teen Spirit” is the title of an album and song from Nirvana. Remember them?

“With the lights out, it’s less dangerous
Here we are now, entertain us.
I feel stupid and contagious
Here we are now, entertain us.”

Anyway, I now know well what Teen Spirit smells like. It’s got a kind of sweet smell that lies somewhere between a newborn’s breath and vomit. It’s full of health and vigor and danger and risk. All I know is, I got a good whiff of it last weekend. MORE ›

I never pictured myself one of those sentimental mothers who would add emotional significance to Senior Prank Night or Mystery Night. I felt more contemporary than that; I could relate to the excitement and sense of anarchy that accompanied the sigh of relief and pride in surviving the gauntlet of high school and college. But I was delusional.

I should have known I was a goner when I burst into tears at my first child’s preschool Halloween Parade, twenty years ago. I’ve cried at any parade or processional ever since. I feel like I’ve been on a rotisserie and repeatedly basted with loss, pride, fear and joy for the last ten years and I’ve still not built up a thick skin. My children have attended a school where everything they’ve done has been memorialized in professionally recorded DVDs, and what is irritatingly evident in every soundtrack has been my laughter and my absolute delight in their existence. I’m like the Devoted Mommy version of Roseanne Barr singing the national anthem. MORE ›

Ok, so maybe I wasn’t really the very oldest person at the three-day festival in the Indio desert last weekend, but I was certainly the most improbable person in the daily crowd of 78,000. I missed Woodstock, but in my teens I had more than my share of dusty and reckless rock bacchanalias. I saw Hendrix burn his guitar and Janis wail and once stood frozen in terror between a battalion of police officers and a gang of Hell’s Angels who were throwing bottles and rocks at them.

Those experiences may look colorful in my autobiography someday, if I can remember them by the time I get around to writing such a thing, but they strike me now as hideous cocktails of second degree sunburns, more dust than a tractor pull, the specter of LSD lacing everything from drinking water to cookies and juice and the inevitable lust and violence that drugs, alcohol and utter exhaustion inspire in young people-or old people for that matter. MORE ›

I’ve been working on this blog since the beginning of the week when 9 teenagers were finally indicted for various crimes that appear to have led to the suicide of Phoebe Prince. Phoebe, for those of you who don’t know, was a 15 year-old freshman and new student from Ireland at a middle class Massachusetts high school who made the mistake of having sex with a senior boy on the football team, thereby inspiring several month of harassment and bullying from his female friends.

One day in January, right before the big school dance, a car of these mean girls drove by Phoebe and hurled an energy drink can at her. She went home and hung herself in her closet. Worse, the mean girls continued the hatefest at the dance two days later. MORE ›

Everybody, please sit down, I have something to share with you: As of this blog, I am going to focus on a single area of concern–TEENAGERS–for the foreseeable future. Yes, you know me as the gadfly who holds forth on everything from pink pubic hair to Sarah Palin (I can’t wait till I can write blog about them both in the SAME post!)

But I have been working on my next book, GIRLFRIENDS’ GUIDE TO TEENAGERS, for a couple of years now, and it occurred to me that perhaps you readers might want to weigh in with your opinions, personal stories and guidance. MORE ›

I’m navigating the road to hell in a 2010 Lexus hybrid, but I started with such good intentions. Not only am I driving a punky little four-cylinder Prius-in-designer-clothing that is the new Lexus HS250H, also known in my house as a Camry with a joystick (for onboard navigation,) but I was the first in my neighborhood to have one. Yay! This car barely makes it up the hill to my home unless I lean forward against the steering wheel and repeat, “I think I can, I think I can.”

If you follow my blogs, you know that I was recently divorced, and this is a time in my life when I’m retooling my image to match my new freedom and independence. I cut my hair quite short, I adopted skinny jeans and worked out to deserve them, I pushed my chef’s clogs (my favorite shoe ever) to the back of my closet and bought several pairs of strappy sandals and peep toes with heels between four and six inches, and I no longer venture outdoors without applying concealer, eyebrows and lipstick with the help of a 10x magnification mirror that allows me to watch my nose hairs grow with the clarity most people watch their Chia Pets sprout. MORE ›

People used to be afraid to be fat; now they’re afraid to say “fat.” Oh, we can talk about diets and exercise and the paucity of plus-size fashions–CONSTANTLY–but we can’t really use the word “fat” as an adjective anymore. Unless, of course, we’re referring to ourselves and are comedic by nature, like Kevin Smith, the director of such inspired movies as “Clerks” and “Mallrats,” who recently was removed from an airline flight because his girth made him a security risk.

His embarrassment became national because he tweeted obsessively about it and is still seeking his pound of flesh, so to speak, from Southwest Airlines. He may actually get it because he is rallying all people over 200 lbs. to join his boycott. With fat being our national condition, he might well militate enough people to affect the airline’s bottom line, so to speak (again.) MORE ›

Does Sarah wake up every day, reach for her specs, slip in her “Bumpit”, and begin snorting around the media outlets like a truffle pig in search of the juicy fungus of persecution? It’s like an itch that she scratches so often it has become a tic.  Every slight is personal in the All About Me Universe of Alaska’s Governor, Interrupted. Nothing is too random or private or just plain irrelevant for her to rush to Facebook with her righteous censure.

Just in case it wasn’t clear from her book, Going Rogue, her skin is so thin that it’s practically transparent. Nothing is her fault or worthy of private reflection. Let’s face it folks, she and her family are pretty broad targets. If it’s not her, it’s her husband, her baby son or one of her daughters. None of us has a family above a dig here or a joke there, nor are we consistent examples of righteousness, but we are infinitely more relaxed about our imperfections.  She wouldn’t beg for a wedgie every time the class clown walked by if she weren’t so delusional about her own perfection. Who can avoid, intentionally or not, taking a swipe at such a humorless and bitter prig? And who can fail to be bored blind (oh, God, I hope she doesn’t take this as an attack on her own optical disability!) MORE ›