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Chick-flick checklist a chemistry lesson

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How does your co-star rate on romance?

The Ultimate Guide to Chick FlicksHere’s a big fat clue for men everywhere — women like chick flicks. They make us happy. We get all mushy and soft lipped and prone to romantic suggestions — or, as my husband likes to put it, “easy”– when the girl ends up with the right guy on screen.

So why is it that we have to drag men kicking and screaming to go see a chick flick? My friend Kim Adelman, who recently authored The Ultimate Guide to Chick Flicks, theorizes that it starts when they’re teenagers.

“Male teenagers, in particular, seem to have an infallible radar detector warning them away from a film that their mother might enjoy, while female teenagers, (who we all know are smarter, more mature, and have much better taste in movies) innately sense that anything with ‘wedding’ or ‘princess’ in the title is worthy of their patronage.”

Then there are real life romances, which of course, are destined to be compared to the movies. Since Kim took the trouble to outline the ten basic steps in a movie romance, I decided to see how they stack up against my real life.

Step One: Create a Sympathetic Heroine

I’m a sympathetic heroine, right? I mean I know I get a bit cranky sometimes, but I think I’m pretty likeable. And I wear glasses, which help hide some of my movie star glamour and make me look smarter, and uh, help me see.

Step Two: Offer up a Love-Worthy Hero

Like many movie heart throbs, my husband was deeply flawed when we met, and has only improved slightly over the past 16 years. But I’m a glutton for funny — even if it’s sometimes an inappropriate kind of funny — and he still makes me laugh.

Plus, I still have faith that he’s a cad truly worthy of redemption.

Step Three: Don’t Forget the Best Friend

Zak and I met at a wedding, and along with the white lace and promises, there was a whole lot of vodka consumed. Like all romantic heroines, I woke up the next morning still wearing my perfect makeup … and immediately hashed over my hangover with my best friend, Jacqueline. I was sure that this thing with Zak would just be a fling.

My sister still thinks it is.

Step Four: Something’s Wrong with the Heroine’s Life

Like many a chick flick chick, I felt incomplete because I had not yet achieved my destiny. I had just broken up with my college boyfriend and hadn’t yet figured out what I wanted to do with my career. I was, in the words of the trailer, “at a crossroads in my life when our paths crossed.”

Step Five: They Meet

See step three.

Step Six: Toss in Impediments to the Romance

This is the tricky part in contemporary romances. Those huge impediments that used to keep people apart — arranged marriages, class issues, religious wars — don’t really exist for the most part, so there have to be some other challenges. Zak and I had geography to battle. He lived in LA and I lived in Santa Barbara. I’d like to see Romeo and Juliet overcome that.

Step Seven: They Dance

We tangoed, we waltzed, we shook our cabooses and we did the Watoosee. While most guys merely tolerate dancing to appease the women in their lives (kind of like going to chick flicks), Zak actually likes to dance and does a good, albeit silly, job of it.

Plus, a lot of our friends were getting married that summer, so we had many opportunities to drink too much and then partake in what Kim calls, “a cinematic illustration that the heroine and hero are destined for each other.”

Step Eight: Pack in as Many Memorable Moments as Possible

Stolen flowers from my landlady’s yard, Pustafix Bubble O’s and poetry for my birthday, battling Friday night LA traffic to come see me, and Monday morning sleepiness to get back to work — these are the things that true romance is made of.

Step Nine: The Hero Employs the Three Magic Words

“Chick flicks serve up on a beautifully garnished platter another thing we desperately wish real men would do as willingly as their fictional counterparts: say ‘I love you,’ said Kim. Of course movie heroes have the benefit of screenwriters to help them out, but my husband actually is a screenwriter, so you’d think he’d have come up with something incredibly memorable.

Not so much.

Zak’s three magic words, which were long overdue by the time he got around to them, turned into about 13, with all of the “um, um, um’s, uh, uh and urghs.

It’s the thought that counts, right?

Step Ten: Achieve the Ultimate Happy Ending

In movies it’s usually the wedding scene that symbolizes that the courtship story line has concluded satisfactorily, but those of us who’ve been married for a while know that tying the knot is just the beginning.

True love is really all about letting your wife pick the movie.

Originally published in South Coast Beacon on March 31, 2005.

A room of my own

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Photo courtesy Cinders in the Dark on Vimeo.

Photo courtesy Cinders in the Dark on Vimeo.

Last week I finally got the answer to the age-old mystery pondered by mothers everywhere: My son has been potty-trained for three years, when do I finally get to use the bathroom by myself?

The answer: When you go on a trip without him.

Last week I tagged along with my friend Cheryl Crabtree, a travel writer (and mom of two boys) who was updating the Central Coast section for Fodor’s Travel Guides. I was ostensibly working on a few travel stories for the Beacon, but mostly I was enjoying having someone else cook my meals (in restaurants with cloth napkins and no kids menus), make my bed (with 600 thread count Egyptian cotton sheets) and drive me around (OK, so Cheryl’s Camry is only slightly more glamorous than my Tercel, but at least she was behind the wheel). Most of all, I was luxuriating in my personal bathroom space.

Guilty thoughts flitted by as I lay soaking in a lavender-scented spa tub at the Ventana Inn & Spa in Big Sur, which is surely one of the most beautiful places on the planet.

I took a sip of my wine and a bite of a perfect strawberry, and watched the stars twinkle over the Pacific Ocean and thought: Here I am, starring in one of the most romantic scenes of my entire life, and my husband is hundreds of miles away, probably eating a Big Mac.

I should feel guilty he’s not here to enjoy this. No really, I should. Guilty. Wracked with it. Hmm.

But what were the odds of my husband being able to relax and enjoy an $800 hotel room?

Even though it was free, I knew he’d be stressing out about Koss breaking something. And if our son weren’t with us, we’d both be stressing out about whether he was okay without us.

All in all I’m much better equipped to enjoy this luxurious bathtub all by myself, I rationalized. He doesn’t even like massages, the rubber-boned freak. This would be wasted on him. Really, I’m doing him a favor.

Oh! Does that strawberry have chocolate on it!

After my bath I tried out the Jacuzzi on my own private patio. Again, it was heaven. Once upon another life, I had a Jacuzzi in my backyard, but it was hard to keep the leaves out, and with the ambient lights of the city, I could never see stars like the ones in Big Sur.

I spotted the Big Dipper, and thought about how excited Koss would be to see it. Santa brought him a telescope, but it’s hard to see stars from our backyard when it’s raining all the time.

Cheryl and I worked hard the next day, and I was exhausted when we finally arrived at the brand new Carlton Hotel, in downtown Atascadero of all places. When you walk in the door you feel like you’re in a first class Boston hotel, or maybe Washington, D.C. Very posiphisticated.

I couldn’t wait to take a bath.

At home, not a week goes by when I don’t come home from work, kick off my shoes and fantasize about a long, hot bath.

We barely have a shower in our teeny tiny rental house, and besides, I can’t even get through the first chorus of “Walking on Sunshine” without Koss having something incredibly important to tell me about his Pokemon cards.

The Carlton has another incredible, oversized spa tub. Between that and the chocolate strawberries, I was in heaven.

“This is the life,” Cheryl and I sigh, as we clink wine glasses and relax, uninterrupted by our real lives.

If I could just freeze time for that first hour of the day when I get home from work, I thought, not for the first time. Just to have an hour a day all to myself, preferably in a spa tub with my masseuse, Juan, no Brad. That would be perfect.

It’s not that I don’t love my son … and I really love that he still wants to be with me all of the time. But who knew when we finally potty-trained him that wouldn’t be the end of it. We’ve been working on privacy training ever since.

My third spa tub — at the Avila Village Inn in Avila Beach — was also heavenly, but the novelty was starting to wear thin. It was awfully quiet in my hotel room, and it sounded like I missed a really fun “attack of the Leprechauns” on Koss’s kindergarten classroom.

It’s hard for me to believe that for all the times I’d craved this peace and quiet and solitude, it only took a few days for me to crave the chaos of home and family. I laughed at what a wimp I’d turned into!

Then I thought about what a kick Koss would get out of the fireplace that goes on with just a flick of a switch and how much fun he would have ordering room service. I call him one more time, just to say goodnight.

I vow to remember his sweet little voice on the phone, the next time he bursts into my shower, seemingly just to annoy me.

I can hardly wait.

Originally published in South Coast Beacon on March 24, 2005.

Kids put the squeeze on the boundaries of cuisine

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Photo by Mojpe, Pixabay.com.

Photo by Mojpe, Pixabay.com.

“When it comes to feeding your kids, everyone’s a critic,” warned my friend Lori.

Sure the food police may be creeping around cafeteria corners and leering at grocery carts, but I’ve come to realize that when it comes to kids and food, there are a lot more hypocrites than critics.

I, for one, am happy when my son eats at all.

Can he really be the only kid in the United States who has never — not a single day in his young life — managed to down the federally-recommended three servings of vegetables, two servings of fruit and two servings of milk per day?

And I’m told, by other concerned parents who are apparently better able to shove food into their children’s small orifices, that when he turns seven he’ll need even more fruits and vegetables. At this rate, he’ll need a broccoli I.V. and brussel sprout drip or he’ll never be able to catch up

Who are these kids that are eating all of these fruits and vegetables? I’ve certainly never met them.

I called the USDA, and they put me in touch with the five-year-old boy who actually follows all of their guidelines. His name is Oliver Q. Stump, and he lives in Denver, CO. He’s in great health, reading at a fourth grade level, and is exceptionally well mannered. However, I found him to be an exceedingly dull conversationalist.

Have a Butterfinger, Oliver. You need to lighten up.

The rest of us can only try. At their Valentine’s Day party, my son’s kindergarten class not only had cookies and cupcakes on the sign-up sheet, but also fruit and vegetables.

I was impressed. Unfortunately, none of the produce actually made it to the party, and I was surprised to find that when the kids opened their Valentine’s cards, at least half of them contained candy.

Were these the same moms that complained about unhealthy croutons in the school’s salad bar?

I had been buying red and pink foil chocolate concoctions for weeks, but it never would have occurred to me to share them with my son, let alone his classmates — and it’s not just because I don’t share chocolate.

While I’ve been following the progress of “healthy chocolate” research at Mars Inc. for years (according to the New York Times, dark chocolate Dove bars are now loaded with more cardiovascularly-friendly flavanols than many green teas), I know better than to make five-year-olds into lab rats.

I prefer my selective scientific gullibility to work only in my favor, not against the integrity of my son and his friends.

“I want to teach my kids that carrots are just as much of a treat as M & Ms,” said my friend Jody.

Good idea, though there’s a reason they never made Willy Wonka and the Rutabaga Factory into a movie.

If it actually worked, there would be a bunch of orange-tinted kids on the playground instead of a bunch of fat kids. For those of you who didn’t get the memo, or have been living under a rock for the past decade, this will be big news: Kids are eating too much junk food and not getting enough exercise.

In other words, they’re acting like adults.

“Can we go to McDonald’s for dinner, Mommy?” asks my son. “They have salads.”

This is how he tries to sell me on McDonald’s, with the temptation of a 12,000 calorie salad — for me. Nonetheless, “Would you actually eat something if I take you there?” I plead.

That’s how low the bar can drop in our house sometimes.

My son, who is five and weighs less than his three-year-old cousin, is almost never hungry. That is, unless he’s sucking up to Grandma or it’s time to go to bed. Then he suddenly gets an appetite.

Anyone who’s ever met me knows this is clearly not genetic.

Ever look up “food issues” in a psychology journal?

My mom was the one who gave me Tab in my fourth grade lunch box and gave out pencils on Halloween.

My dad was the one who made me the top seller every Girl Scout cookie season. He would eat them before I could even make the rounds of the neighbors, a weakness later discovered by the SBCC women’s volleyball team, who made a fortune by storing their fundraising candy bars in his office one year.

My husband is the tall, skinny guy who, after years of cutthroat “eat all your vegetables” contests with his siblings, has not had anything green pass his lips (other than a beer on St. Patrick’s Day) since he left home for college.

And I am the one who rejoiced at the healthy kids meal we recently had at Bubba Gump’s in Long Beach, which included carrot sticks and celery with the chicken strips and fries.

My heart went pitter-patter when Koss actually ate a carrot.

So what if he mistook it for a French fry, he still swallowed.

Like I said, the bar is low.

Originally published in South Coast Beacon on March 3, 2005.