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?

I, for one, am microwaving popcorn and settling in with my iPad, TV and gossip mags on my sofa. It’s many things, but to me it’s entertainment. It’s so extreme and perverse, yet somehow non-threatening, that I find it diverting. Lust, greed, lots of injectibles and orthodontia combining with one man’s struggle to deny time and the diminishment of his potency are the stuff of King Lear and MacBeth. How fun! I just wish it were better written.

If I were Lindsey Lohan’s P.R. agent, I’d be squeezing myself with delight right now. Only Mel and Oksana’s cocktail of narcissism, sex, ambition and treachery could have diverted America from her jail sentence and entrance into drug rehab. Or is it vice versa, I can’t recall. Then again, Lindsey is existing on the fumes of celebrity rather than an actual career these days and might resent every anguishing moment of the Aussie actor’s compelling disintegration.

Who is Mel Gibson to you or me anyway? A performer. An actor, folks, and a good one. His most distinguished contributions to the screen have always been sociopaths and extremists. Mad Max, Lethal Weapon, Braveheart — not a single character you’d want to leave your dog and kids with for a weekend. Sure, he has played other, more moderate men, but he vibrates in an irresistible frequency when he plays men with outsized egos who are seized with paranoia. We can’t get enough of that guy.

And then we have Apocalypto and The Passion of the Christ, for Christ’s sake (pardon me, I couldn’t resist)! What right-sized person would write and direct such arrogant and agonized films? It’s not like he wasn’t preparing us for this less-compelling and sordid drama in his personal life. To borrow from F. Scott Fitzgerald, the artistic are very different from you and me, and I find them exhilarating.

Singer/songwriters, painters, writers and actors, not to mention inventors and philosophers and architects are often very tortured and self-involved people. Being one of their intimates, lovers, spouses, or children can be so damaging as to require them to wear asbestos suits. But for the rest of us it is often moving, inspiring and transcendent to share the fruits of their insanity.

The Mel Gibson who intrigues me is not the ordinary man of Radaronline.com or Entertainment Tonight; in fact that guy is embarrassingly predictable and pedestrian. I prefer my Murtoughs and William Wallaces to be the insane heroes of popular mythology. It would be nice if Mel Gibson could spare us his personal indelicacies and really move us again. C’mon, Mel, put it on the screen!

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.

Right now I can name some great repercussions of this separation: First, Tipper will lose ten to twenty pounds in the next few months. We all do. Al will start dressing more imaginatively. They all do. Both of them will start paying more attention to their undergarments and neither of them will continue driving cars with hatchbacks or “sports utility” in the name.

That said, I’m guessing Al has been tempted to trade on the whole Nobel-Prize-Academy-Award-I-Really-Won-the-Presidency thing that makes a 62 year-old man look and feel like Elvis. I’m also guessing that Tipper has had it up to here with the adoration and indulgence that all middle-aged Elvises require. To be fair, she probably looks at him with that expression that says, “I know who you really are, Bud, and I’m not impressed.” What newly-invigorated and reiterated person wants to be haunted by the one person who knows what a goof you used to be?

They have raised four kids and at least the three girls appear to be doing as well as anybody’s kids. Son Albert III has some dodgy bits with his proclivity for drugs and speeding, but hey, he could be almost anybody’s kid, too. All in all, they seem to have been attentive and loving parents. Call me crazy, but I can’t think of any other reason for people to marry than to raise kids or protect the monarchy.

Sure, Tipper was a little lame in her music lyric censoring phase, and that kiss at the Democratic Convention made most of us vomit a little into our mouths, but they were corny and cute, and besides, they would never have had to stoop so low if the Clintons had at least once acted like they were hot for each other. Besides, any politician who could claim Tommy Lee Jones as a college roommate must have some contact coolness, right?

I, for one, would like to thank Al and Tipper for sparing us the melodrama that typically accompanies such a high-profile split. In fact, I’d consider it a mitzvah if TMZ and the rest of the bottom feeders were to respect the demise of the Gore marriage at least as much as they would, theoretically, respect the creation of it.

It helps, I’m sure, that the Gores appear to have the financial means to create two households without putting either of them on public assistance. Marriage, throughout history, has been an economic relationship that until recently had little to do with romance.

Unfortunately, many people who have reached the romantic ebb in their later years stay married because they simply can’t afford to split up. Tipper and Al can afford it and they’re separating. Good for them that they aren’t forced to stay together to afford their rent-stabilized apartment in Nashville.

You’ve got to be pretty brave to decide to create a whole new life for yourself after your first half-century. Such a decisive split means everything from getting new stationery to becoming accustomed to not knowing what to do with yourself on those weekends when all your married friends are tied up with their families and you would rather stay in bed and watch old movies than have the paparazzi photograph you and your dinner date.

Then again, it’s a new beginning for both of them while they’re young and vital enough to rise to the challenge. The worst part of staying in a stale marriage is the sacrifice of imagination. If a person stays put because they can’t imagine anything better, then they’re probably right where they belong. For the rest of us, I pray the adventure is worth it.

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.

I’ve been around the most beloved and wonderful kids who are getting named MVP and Most Like to Be Made President By Acclamation (thereby skipping the filthy business of getting elected in today’s political process) and matriculating to good colleges or graduating college and taking up their adult journeys. Some of them might be my own offspring and others are dear to me as part of the community that helped raise them, but I’ve been told I’m never to name names so…

Last weekend, the daylight hours were devoted to end of season lacrosse barbecues and religious instruction for Confirmation and other such moving and inspiring illustrations of hope and faith in the generation I helped populate with my own contribution of two boys and two girls. I actually made Tollhouse cookies from scratch and did some of their laundry and was grateful for the privilege.

But, to quote Mick Jagger, “The sunshine bores the daylights out of [teenagers]” and I saw the smoke signals over my own home that an ill-conceived party was brewing somewhere in my village. This was a party at a house that was rented for the day. No parents, on the premises or not, and certainly no homeowner’s insurance to cover accidental death or maiming. As if that weren’t bad enough, the kids throwing it were charging admission.

Parents of tweens, take it from me: Parties that start after 10pm and charge admission are Bad News. There are millions of them on your horizon and most of them are as risky as you fear. Kids who throw parties when their ‘rents are out of town or are completely naïve about what kids will do “with the lights out” almost never charge for admission. Teen promoters are well aware that they can only demand money if there are no people with fully developed frontal cortexes involved and way too many kids with no ability to successfully predict the consequences of spontaneous and silly decisions are invited, in the hundreds.

Not only was I once a teen that believed no party was complete until someone threw up in technicolor from all the wine drinks with screw tops that looked like Kool-Aid, but also I’m no stranger to parenting teens. I have a nose for that kind of teen spirit. Nonetheless, I’m also resigned to the fact that three of my kids are now “legally” adult (who the hell thought 18 years on earth indicated a sound mind?) and I try to give privileges where deserved.

Go ahead and throw the first stone; I know I’m indulgent and weak-spined at times where my kids are concerned. Chalk that up to decent kids who have stayed out of jail and not made me a grandmother prematurely, mixed with the effects of brain damage and fatigue at mothering four teenagers at one time.

Still, forewarned as I was, I hired a driver to deliver my kids and stand right outside the door to stack them and their friends inside his car like cord wood if necessary to bring them all safely home. But at 2am, I was wide awake, texting my kids till my fingers smoked and learning that they hadn’t found the driver and that they’d found other rides home. Do you know what that feels like to a mother?

Other rides home? That’s like getting a text that they’ve swallowed glass and don’t know yet if it will slice through their esophaguses! All you can do is wait and pray. These are the times when I couldn’t care less whether my precious children shake hands with adults and look them in the eye when introduced or hand-write thank you notes in a timely fashion. All I want is for them to LIVE!

Once again, they did live, and I am truly grateful. But here is what I learned from this agony: Teen parties are sometimes as horrifying as I imagine. Just as I learned that rock festivals like Coachella are a lot tamer than those of my own youth, I learned this weekend that teen parties are more outrageous than those of my own wild youth in their yearning for extremes. More sex, more alcohol and more MORE characterize these “revels.”

I don’t know if our kids are more easily bored, more protected and hovered over by us Boomer and Gen-X parents, or more insanely pressured by a world that looks as though there is no abundance in their future—only shortages of work, of the assumption of safety and continuity, and of natural resources. Sometimes I worry that teen spirit occasionally smells like fear, and that us grownups are partly to blame.

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.

This year is a perfect storm of graduations for me. I have a high school senior of my own graduating. His girlfriend is graduating from another school a week before him. My younger daughter’s boyfriend is graduating with my high school son; my college sophomore’s boyfriend is graduating from college, as is my niece and my oldest son’s best friends, and my firstborn’s girlfriend.

I could just die. Don’t get me wrong; I’m not your typical empty nester fretting about my kids leaving me. With two already living away and a third on his way to New York in the fall, I’m kind of relishing the freedom—particularly since I’ve become single this last year, as well. No, what kills me is their beauty, their optimism and their relief in their accomplishments. It’s a beautiful thing to behold.

As many of you know, my next book is called the Girfriends’ Guide to Teenagers, and my focus for the last couple of years has been the scary, alarming, pray-to-God moments of motherhood. Yet today, in this perfect storm, I am at the peaceful center. I am amazed that most of them have survived ADHD, drunken driving, love affairs and irresponsibility. What a relief to know that their DNA has driven them to survive and succeed—in spite of my mistakes in mothering them and the world’s vicious slights like oil spills, terrorist threats and unemployment.

So far, no felons or pregnancies in the lot! Not only that, but their spirits are still vivid and optimistic and eager. It reminds me of the movie I saw on Mother’s Day, “Babies.” Four newborns were compelled to feed themselves, crawl and eventually rise up on two feet—no matter how much or how little their parents were involved. It’s a beautiful thing, Mother Nature; she makes sure that our offspring proceed on that inexorable progression into their own futures. As I wrote in my book, the Girlfriends’ Guide to Surviving the First Year of Motherhood, a mother can tell she’s done a good enough job raising her children when they feel free to leave her. They are, sadly, meant to leave the nest and fly.

And fly they do. Over the next few weekends, millions of our babies will be launching themselves out of the nest. Most of them know that they can retreat to the nest from time to time, but they are inimitably driven to discover their own futures and prove themselves independent from us, their ‘rents.

If I could bottle that courage and optimism, along with their naïve beauty and vigor, I’d be bigger than the “Sham-Wow” and Donald Trump combined.

Happy Graduation, everyone! And thank you, Mother Nature!

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.

So when I was invited to attend and share a hotel room by my girlfriend Wanda, also a mother old enough to know better, I couldn’t decline quickly enough.

But when I heard that another of our great friends was going out to keep a benign eye on her son and several of his friends, I felt like I was surrendering to the inertia and caution of the aged by not going. I called Wanda back and enthusiastically announced I would, indeed, join the party.

My bravado was largely insincere, but since I’ve become single again after nearly 30 years, my weekends largely consist of reading, knitting and waiting for one teen child or another to finally come home (that’s just between us, of course!) and I thought this might be a kick start to my Third Act. The fact that I went to bed at 7pm on Sunday night and wanted to sleep much of Monday to recover is probably a sign that it wasn’t, but…

Three of my four kids, ages 18, 20 and 22 (the youngest having gone for a day last year and succumbing to allergic asthma from the dust, wisely had sworn off such gatherings) were going, for the fourth or fifth year, so I texted them all to let them know I’d be joining in all the fun. My announcement inspired absolute silence in all of them, except the youngest, who told me I didn’t belong there and shouldn’t chase my youth so pathetically. She also admonished me not to make eye contact or greet any of her friends, should I run into them, since I would be a walking humiliation to our family.

Here’s the good news: The crowds of teens and young adults who amassed there didn’t display the depravity I remember from my own youth. This may be attributed to the rigid security that outlawed bringing in or taking off the premises any beverages. Margaritas and beer flowed freely for those who had been duly carded and given a wristband designating them to be over 21. I stood in line to get a wristband and was not even asked for i.d.-in fact the young woman in charge didn’t even make eye contact with me, probably for fear of laughing or showing her disdain. I jokingly asked her if she needed to see my driver’s license and she just smirked.

At one point we were admitted to an area called Backstage. It had no access to any of the three stages and offered nothing that the other areas didn’t, except a few picnic tables-places to sit above the ground, which existed nowhere else. It also had something I’ve never seen at a rock concert, a “safe haven” tent devoted to “Friends of Bill W”, a euphemism for members of Alcoholics Anonymous. Not a soul was in there, but my guess was that sober people were already sleeping on some friend’s floor or acting as designated drivers for those folks Bill W. didn’t know.

I might have fit in better with my few peers who attended had I stopped coloring my hair about three years ago and worn Birkenstock sandals and a peasant skirt with a fanny pack. Wanda and I tried to dress down and inconspicuously, with our SPF 30 and lip gloss in place, our cashmere wraps and designer knock-offs of the trendy clothes the teens bought for about $10 a pound at American Apparel and cut with scissors rather than altered. Our purses, alone, pegged us for middle-aged semi-affluence. Perhaps the fact that I also carried a Costco-sized bottle of Excedrin in one fist was the biggest giveaway.

I might have looked cranky, too, since we’d parked so far from the venue that it took over 20 minutes of wandering in absolute darkness and through such a fine and clinging dust that my feet looked like I was wearing brown socks. If my car hadn’t responded to the beeper on my keychain, I would still be wandering like Moses.

Once we finally got in to the VIP area, which gave absolutely no indication of being any more exclusive than the Selective Service, it was entertaining to watch how young people behave in their natural habitat. Those not old enough for a legal-drinking wristband seemed to have gotten their parties started in the parking lots and cars and wherever they were crashing for the night.

Youth is so beautiful and I was reminded again of this at Coachella. The girls with their faintly sunburned cheeks looked as ripe and fresh as nectarines and most of the boys still had faint traces of the baby faces they’d had six or seven years ago. They all looked “at home” in this unlikely part of the world and certain that they were exactly where they should be (even if their parents might have disagreed.)

If I’d known at their age what I know now, I would have been so much kinder and accepting of myself. I would have surrendered myself to the crazy community of my strange peers. That’s what the festival most revealed to me; the sweet and rowdy fun of kids willingly giving three days of their lives to join the crowd, hear the tunes and slide from scene to scene as if they were jellyfish on a gentle tide. It looked intoxicating.

I, on the other hand, changed into my running shoes with slip-in orthotics by the second day to ease the strain on my lower back. I was not bobbing on any tide, but forever swimming against it. I was constantly taking inventories of where my keys were, where Wanda was, how my kids were, if I was actually standing where I should, if there was a place to sit nearby and when I should leave to avoid the mass exit and resulting two-hour gridlock in the parking lots.

Beneath the chaos of my monkey brain ran the refrain, “Who are all these people?” These people were surely asking themselves, “Is she a narc? Does she know my parents?” Yes, as a matter of fact, I did know some of their parents, but what happened in Indio stays in Indio, and I’d appreciate it if they’d extend the same courtesy to me.

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.

Parents across the country and in Europe are sickened and terrified by such malice. We hate this window into a female version of Lord of the Flies savagery; we recognize the pain of our own old wounds at the hands of our peers in school and feel threatened anew; we believe that there, but for the grace of God, go our own children; and we frantically seek to find a solution to protect all our kids.

I’m still writing this blog at 9pm before my post tomorrow morning because I’ve already thrown out three versions. Three times I’ve attempted to offer warning signs and rescues, and three times I’ve found them insufficient. This last rewrite is to say that I, like so many of you, don’t really know what we should do about bullies and the kids they victimize.

I’ve nearly raised the last of my four teenagers and I am writing my fifth book in my series of Girlfriends’ Guides-devoting this one to, naturally, teenagers. In the last two years of conducting interviews and doing research, I’ve met with parents of ‘teens and teens and repeatedly felt the agony and helplessness of parents of kids who were being ostracized, ridiculed or tormented by other kids. With four kids of my own, I’ve experienced enough to feel those parents’ pain, too.

There have been many blogs and editorials since January about Phoebe Prince and the thousands of victims she represents. When the indictments came down, I was hoping to feel some small, albeit pathetic, satisfaction, but I don’t. Phoebe is still dead. My gut tells me that legal action taken against these young people does little to spare future victims.

We’ve learned from scientists that teenagers specifically lack the ability to extrapolate to the consequences of their actions, so I’m thinking that these nine probably are incapable of learning anything more than how expensive lawyers are.

Even that is a lesson for their parents more than for them. An argument could be made that these criminal charges will put parents on notice that they have to try to monitor and control their kids’ behavior, but that urgency will soon pass. Plus, it’s harder than it sounds.

Particularly disturbing to me is my observation that parents often contribute to the problem by seeing this conflict through the eyes of their own ‘teen and teen selves, rather than as fully actualized adults. If our kids seem popular and powerful at school, many of us secretly admire them and thank God that they’re who we always wanted to be when we were their age. If our kids seem to be struggling to “fit in,” we often use our adult power to address the childish need to be in the “in crowd.”

We suck up to the popular kids and their parents, we join in our children’s attempts to get taller, get thinner thighs, get straighter hair, get athletic and get clearer skin. It’s as if we have learned nothing more from our own survival of these treacherous times than how to play the game again through our own kids-hoping this time we’re better equipped to beat up a 16 year-old bully.

When we fail, yet again, to master the subtleties and nuances of ‘teen and teen social hierarchies we turn to the schools to help us rescue our kids. We get primitive in our urgency to protect our kids and would be thrilled if bullies were publicly flogged or put in the stocks, and it’s so frustrating to learn that our child’s personal hell becomes just another aspect of the crowd control that educators must engage in before a single lesson can be taught.

Bullying has turned into Hydra with the advent of social networking. Tormenting has one head in the classroom, another head at the athletic events, another on Facebook and yet another on our kids’ phones. Whom do we blame; Mark Zuckerberg, the teachers, the other parents, the kids? It doesn’t even matter at this point because that is not where the solution will be found.

Our best bet is in ourselves because that’s all we can really control. We have to be alert to the dangers and become activists in our children’s lives.

I’m a divorced mom who was raised by a divorced mom, so I’m not pointing fingers here, but one thing that stands out to me about Phoebe’s life was that she was living with her mother in the US, but she hadn’t seen her father, who remained in Ireland, since the move. We have to at least consider that having a father in her daily life might have influenced her choice regarding the boy she had sex with. I’m just saying…

Another thing I do know is that my greatest insights into my kids’ lives has been gained while driving, cooking or dining with them. These are time-consuming commitments for most of us and our kids often resist our attempts to hang with them, but those moments are worth fighting for-if only to keep them off the computer for fifteen extra minutes a day.

I have a hunch that creating a strong family identity helps our kids survive the times when their friends (or acquaintances) fail them. If they believe that their parents, siblings, grandparents, aunts, whatever, are consistently present and supportive of them, this sense of belonging somewhere might protect them in the fragile and vulnerable times. In the absence of blood relatives, trusted friends are just as good.

That means that we parents have to make the time to nurture and sustain relationships with whatever extended family we can muster. Our kids certainly aren’t up to the job and our “family members” may not be as motivated as we are to get together regularly and stay involved. This is where we parents have to stop whining and do the heavy lifting. I don’t care how crazy your sister drives you.

And the last thing I can think of tonight that has looked effective in helping kids to survive bullying is to MOVE THEM TO ANOTHER SCHOOL! I have scores of friends and acquaintances who eventually gave up trying to make the environment change to accept their kids and changed their kids’ environment to suit them instead. It’s never a defeat to decide that our kids can’t thrive where they are. Social rules and hierarchies vary incredibly from school to school and if your child’s school isn’t serving them, you can probably find one that will. Be bold there and make a move because the bullying may be more circumstantial to a certain school than personal to your baby.

That’s all I’ve got for now. Please comment and give me another other suggestions or observations to help us all out. I only have one rule: If you don’t now and have never had a ‘tween or teen, I don’t want to hear what you have to say. No disrespect intended, but you just don’t know what the hell you’re talking about!

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.

Just to refresh your memory, or inform those of you who don’t know me as the author of the GIRLFRIENDS’ GUIDES series, I birthed four kids in six years (singletons all) and recently barely survived having an 18, 16, 14 and 12-year-old at the same time. My marriage ended shortly after that, -but that was probably just coincidental. Now I have a 22-year-old son, a 20-year-old daughter, an 18-year-old son and a 16-year-old daughter. The bigger the kids, it turns out, the bigger the problems–but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

As usual with my GIRLFRIENDS’ GUIDES, this book is not a “parenting guide,” but rather a survival guide for us moms (and dads) who are alternately terrified of and disgusted by teen behavior, who secretly want to be teenagers again, and who yearn to protect their teens from the mistakes we parents made all those years ago.

While this book will cover teens of all ages, I’m particularly focused on the parents of pre-teens for two reasons: First, because the dread is so profound at the very beginning of “Mr. Teen’s Wild Ride” and the indicators are so vague. Second, because I believe that if a parent has any chance in hell of influencing a teen’s behavior, they’d better get their licks in before 8th grade–aka ARMAGEDDON!

What I’d like to ask of you this week is for you to share your top fears, concerns and non-negotiables as far as your teen’s behavior is concerned. Let me start with some of mine; starting with the biggest worries to the lesser ones:

1. That My Teen Will Die. There, I’ve said the unspeakable bogeyman. We rarely voice this terror, but it’s implied in our fears of drunk driving, drug use, reckless behavior and, of course, DEPRESSION–that could lead to a teen taking his or her own life.

2. That Someone, a Stranger or a Friend, Will Abuse My Teen

3. That My Teen Will Be a Party to an Unwanted Pregnancy

4. That My Teen Will Get Kicked Out of School and Have No Job Prospects

5. That My Teen Will Sincerely Believe that Oral Sex Is Not SEX

6. That My Teen Will Have an Eating Disorder–No Matter if it’s Obesity or Anorexia

7. That My Child Will Get a Sexually-Transmitted Disease That Sticks Around AFTER Antibiotics

8. That My Child Talks to Sexual Predators Online and Meets Up With Them

9. That My Child Really Means it When He/She Screams, “I HATE YOU!!”

There, that’s a start. Now let’s see what you all can add or reiterate to that list. I’m forever grateful, and, NO, I will not be sharing my royalties with you.

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.

Needless to say, buying this particular Lexus was about as sexy as wearing big girl panty briefs. I used to fantasize that when I turned fifty, I would buy an azure blue Bentley convertible with cream interior, but I was married then. I adjusted the dream after divorce to an Astin Martin db9 or a vintage Porsche 911. When the time came, however, I caved into the angel on my shoulder and bought a socially correct car that had almost no harmful emissions and sipped gasoline as though through a cocktail straw.

I get no emotional resonance from this putt-putt, except perhaps an unattractive smugness at my sacrifice for all the rest of you people. We, my car and I, have such little chemistry that I don’t recognize it in a parking lot or even when it’s presented to me by a restaurant valet. “Madame, this is your car,” they call out to me, and I look behind me to see the nerd they must be talking to. It’s only because I recognize the little hot pink flashlight and white rape whistle on my keychain that I finally slouch into the driver’s seat.

And, if such sacrifice is good enough for me, you can bet I decided it was good enough for my teen daughter when we went shopping for her first car. After consulting Consumer Reports and visiting dealerships, we went back to the well for another Toyota that is so unattractive that Jay-Z ridicules it in his song “Empire State of Mind”: “Whatchu think I rap for, to push a f-_____g Rav-4?”

You guessed it: my beautiful baby is now driving a black Rav-4. She’s been such a good sport, especially considering her three older sibs drive sexier imports or the “pretend” hybrid that is the Yukon. And, as I said, the universe has acknowledged this sacrifice by keeping even this uninspiring vehicle locked in the garage. I could have just skipped buying her a car completely.

For weeks, I kept the keys from her while we waited to see what Mr. Toyoda was going to offer to fix the runaway car problem. In the meantime, the dealer earnestly advised me to let her drive the car and coach her on what to do if, indeed, her accelerator stuck:

“It’s a keyless ignition, so she can’t just turn the car off, but tell her to keep trying to apply the brake, even though she won’t feel any braking sensation, but she should throw the car into Neutral, which could send her a little out of control and heading toward the windshield, but tell her to stay calm because the car should slow down some after she’s broken the transmission and then she should sloooooowly apply the parking break. Plus, that’s what airbags are for. If none of that works, she can call 911 and a police car or Highway Patrolman can pull up beside her and talk her through it and help her find a soft place to bring the car to a halt.”

Was he telling me she would be looking for a pile of soft mattresses or sand-filled garbage cans into which she could CRASH??? She just recently learned to pull over and stop without having a panic attack when she hears a siren behind her, and this stooge is telling me that she should be able to dismantle her Japanese import at 100 mph? Where are the Lemon Laws pertaining to sales of defective cars when we need them? I’d like to hurl a few hard lemons at that ass.

What fun it’s been though, particularly for me, to wait for my recall notices. I started going on line to take the initiative over two months ago, and last week I get a printed notice in the mail. It’s my investment of about $30,000, not to mention my baby’s LIFE, we’re talking about here.

Her car had some tweaking done to the accelerator, which I’m sure is akin to holding a frog to get rid of a wart. The floor mats were screwed to the floor of the car already, so her Rav was declared “healed.” Praise the Lord!

My Lexus, which was recalled for its tendency to lose control of its bowels or something when asked to brake and adjust to an irregularity in the road, was also recalled. Have these Toyota people ever seen the potholes in California’s 50 year-old freeway system? You can hide a suitcase in many of them. I hope they’re not fooling themselves or us by thinking this is a brand new problem because I’ve experienced it with both my 2008 Lexus hybrid and my new one. It’s like these cars have performance anxiety and just go rigid when asked to multitask.

I played along and took Putt Putt in for the recall and they kept it for a few hours to “adjust the onboard computer for a software glitch.” Funny, a week later, my assistant took it in again, not knowing that I had, and they “fixed” it again. You’d think they might have noticed that it was no longer broken after the first “fix,” but some of life’s mysteries are simply unfathomable.

Guess what they told me the real culprit is in my car’s spastic tendencies—
THE HYBRID ENGINE!! Try to do a good deed, and this is what we get?? I’m not one for conspiracy theories, but I sincerely believe that when most humans have a choice to get money or get holy, they pick the former. There is no doubt in my mind that neither of our cars is fixed, really.

My growing paranoia convinces me that the Toyotans know that a true repair would be to scrap the entire onboard computer, which is the 21st century equivalent of breaking the frame with a sledgehammer. I’m willing to be a bit risky with my own life, but what am I supposed to do about my daughter’s car?

Hey, Jay-Z, interested in a two-fer? I’ll sell you my Lexus for the pocket change you have on you and throw in a “f_____g Rav-4 for free.

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.)

This is why everyone in the media business is terrified of the “F” word. With a recent national study showing that over 72 percent of the US is either overweight or obese, to offend that group can have serious repercussions. The utter ridiculousness of this phobia was played out this week on ABC’s “Nightline,” where a panel of silly people debated whether being fat is, indeed, a bad thing.

One silly panelist was a fat young woman (there, I’ve said it!), another a former model who now wears a size 12 (the average 5′4″ American woman wears a size 16. The model was about 5′10–you do the math), a former fatty who dieted about 100 pounds off her frame and a silly skinny extremist whose mission is to chastise fat people for costing not-fat people countless dollars in health care and accommodations.

Moderator, JuJu Chang, consulted this panel, pretending that she had a good representation of the population and that they had some expertise. Their expertise was simply that they wanted to be right and justify their own points of view. Even though “Nightline” airs at 11:30 p.m. and I watch in from bed as I drift off to sleep, I was so ticked off by its absurdity that I was out of bed and at my laptop within minutes.

Just because most people are fat doesn’t mean that it’s a good thing. Most of us lie, too, but it doesn’t make it right. Type II diabetes isn’t good for us, even if, in our democratic society, we would vote it so. Remember our mothers admonishing us, “If Johnny were to jump off a cliff, would that make it okay for you to do it, too?” Well, Mom’s right–just ‘cuz everybody’s fat doesn’t make it cool.

I’m not making a character judgment about fat people. My personal interpretation of the facts is that our DNA is undermining our best efforts–not personal slovenliness or lack of backbone. We were designed to be hunter/gatherers who did not eat regularly or with any predictability. When we got smart enough to master our environment by becoming an agricultural society who planted, harvested and collected livestock, our genes didn’t keep up. We were still meant to be intermittent and light eaters. When we got really smart, we could process our foods to make them stretch even further and delight our taste buds.

Think about it, our ancestors wouldn’t have known or cared about getting the seasonings just right in a meal; a meal might be a squirrel’s backside and some barely-digestible root or grass. An appetizer, main course and dessert with a tasty Chianti may be divine, but we weren’t designed to eat this way. It’s a huge disappointment, that’s for sure, but the facts remain the same.

Think of it this way: We developed to walk on two feet rather than four, but modern man is cursed by back ailments because our bone structure hasn’t caught up with this wondrous accomplishment. Our tailbones turn in on themselves and our discs are herniating like suicide bombers. The greatest risk to old people is injury from falling. Old dogs don’t break a hip climbing out of a tub because they still use all four limbs. Evolution is an imperfect journey, at best.

Everything we do to avoid the conclusion that we simply have to eat much less of everything is going to kill us. We can have tantrums and look for pills or gastric bypass or some other miracle to allow us to eat the same and weigh less, but the truth is that the only real solution is to push away from the dinner table about 20 minutes earlier than we want to. It stinks and makes us very cranky, but we can’t change it.

Not talking about it is cowardly and patronizing and, ultimately cruel because behind almost every fat child is a fat parent who can’t demonstrate the behavior necessary to rescue them from this life sentence. A recent European study said that a child who was fat by age three was overwhelmingly destined to be a fat adult. We can blame TV advertising and processed foods all we want, but a fat toddler is almost always created by a fat parent–and, no, it’s not because of their genes or because they’re “big boned.” Why don’t we ever see any “big boned” fatties holding on to their weight in starving populations or on the Bataan Death March? Because there is no such thing!

The more cowardly we become about fat and the longer we pretend that we can continue eating while our bodies revolt against us by getting sicker and sicker, the more we fail our children and their children. Bill Clinton and Arnold Schwarzenegger just held a summit against childhood obesity in California and the former President said that we parents might be the last generation to live longer than our own parents. Our children are dying and we’re trying to be politically correct. This can’t be right. Let’s call fat by its proper name: Murderer.

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!)

I, for one, wonder why she chose to take on last Sunday’s “Family Guy” as an attack on her little boy, Trig, who has Down’s Syndrome. First of all, the character who was supposed to be representing Sarah’s baby boy was a grown woman on a date. If Sarah weren’t so myopic in her outrage, she might just as easily have taken the fact that the character described her parents as “the former governor of Alaska and an accountant” as a compliment.

What, Todd Palin, former “First Dude,” prizewinning snowmobiler and North Slope oil pipeline manager, an accountant? Didn’t Sarah recognize the erroneous inflation of her husband’s education as a gift horse? No, because judging, condemning and calling for everyone’s firing is much more suitable to her temperament.

In fact, it appears that she has a whole raft of people looking for statements, behavior or themes for her to identify and condemn. I’m willing to bet my DirecTV that she has never watched “Family Guy.” Are you kidding? And miss “Desperate Housewives” and “Keeping Up With the Kardashians”? Not a chance!

On Facebook, she credited America’s favorite baby mama, Bristol, with bringing the TV episode to her attention. God bless, Mother Sarah; in spite of feeling “kicked in the stomach,” by the cartoon, she turned the repugnant experience into a teaching moment for her daughter, “Well, Bristol, how did it make YOU feel?”

Personally, I’d rather hear how Trig feels; at least he’s justifiably uninformed (for his AGE, people—don’t turn on me here!) and completely uninterested in seeking the worst in every “liberal” with name recognition.

Don’t these Palins have real jobs?  Or is that Sarah’s job; being humorless and vindictive for her Mad Hatter’s Tea Party friends? As if the dormouse and the March Hare weren’t enough to put a person off such gatherings. “Off with their heads!” she decries so consistently that she makes the Queen of Hearts look benevolent.