Withered by star glower

Withered by star glower
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published Saturday August 10, 2013

Last week I had a disheartening conversation with a gaggle of schoolgirls in an icecream shop. My 6-year-old son and his little sister were capitalising on the ‘free taste tests’ from an icecream lady who was tirelessly handing them morsel after morsel on tiny spoons. While two small children debated the merits of bubblegum over banana, I turned to the three teens behind us. “Sorry! Are you in a hurry?” I asked. “This is the most important decision my kids’ll make all week. When I was an icecream scooper, we weren’t allowed to give free tastes!”

The girls laughed and one replied: “Like who’d ever work in an icecream shop!” I was taken aback. “Yep,” I said, “the icecream was so hard, my arms would ache from dragging the scoop through it. I got paid six-bucks an hour.” The girl in the middle snorted. I persevered: “Have you girls got part-time jobs?”

“Nah,” they said, ‘”We’re only 13.”  

Curious, I asked: “So any ideas about what you want to be yet?”

“Famous!” said the girl on giraffe legs, and for a moment I thought she was joking.

“Famous for what?”

She shrugged: “Whatever. Just famous.”

On the walk home with my sticky children, I wondered if those teenagers believed fame was their birthright. Had they been brainwashed into thinking celebrity status comes without hard work?  

Today, the travelling circus we call reality TV sells us overnight successes. It thrusts people into the spotlight for brief applause then discards them as the parade moves on.

The last star I met was Bette Midler. In 1997, I interviewed her in Los Angeles. Her film That Old Feeling was about to premiere in Australia. It was a stinker and I expect she knew.

I walked into a posh hotel suite to find a woman with a huge head sitting on top of a pint-sized body. Her feet and hands were tiny – dainty extremities overwhelmed by a jutting bosom and a mop of frizz. She was sweating under a bank of studio lights which made her skin so dewy, I could barely make out where her face stopped and her neck began. Unaware that journalists should be lap-dogs during the Hollywood interview, I ploughed straight in and asked:  “Do you ever get tired of fame?”

She stared at me, then barked: “Do you?!”

I spluttered something about being a nobody, but it was too late. She sulked for the next 10 minutes. Refusing to make eye contact, she gave my questions one syllable responses, not caring a jot about what Australian audiences would make of her. The interview was a disaster. The dressing down tirade I got from her publicist afterwards was excruciating. I’m still not sure what riled her: my impertinent question or the fact she couldn’t answer it.

I thought fame was unattainable when I was a kid. There were few celebrities in my patch of town, though a girl in my year had a dad who read sport on the TV news. That gave her instant social status at school. She had the kind of prestige that this single child of divorced parents could only fantasise about.

At age eleven, I would tear home on my bike to an empty house, knowing Simon Townsend’s Wonder World was about to start. Our Thorn TV, on its sturdy wooden legs, needed a good ten seconds to warm up and deliver a flickering screen.

Sprawled into a brown corduroy beanbag, I was captivated by the most famous show on kid’s telly. Simon Townsend was a reluctant celebrity. I remember reading in the newspaper that he’d been embarrassed when kids mobbed him at a school visit. I admired him even more for that.

Mum’s rule was no telly after school, but my secret trysts with Simon Townsend made me desperate to become one of his roving reporters.

At puberty, the closest I came to hero-worship was plastering the walls of my bedroom with centrefolds of heart-throb Rob Lowe and posters of Abba.  Celebrities were good wallpaper but their world didn’t intersect with mine.

Now the likes of Kim Kardashian (famous for what, I can’t remember) are slaves to their own publicity. Craving constant attention, they obsess as much about their following as the star-struck fans who stalk them on social media. The more bizarre the celebrity behaviour, the more the money rolls into their account.

I keep thinking about those girls in the ice-cream shop. They didn’t want to become famous for being talented at something they loved. They were convinced stardom was a shortcut to wealth and happiness. But it was their sense of entitlement that puzzled me most.

I tell Mum about them and she remarks: “In our day, if you behaved like a show pony, you were considered undignified. Famous people earned respect when they were humble.”

She was right.

I hate to say it, Bette, but that day we met, you were obnoxious. I liked you better when you sang your way to the top.

Playing it cool

Playing it cool
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published Saturday June 15, 2013

You have to be cool to know cool. I have no such expertise. By the time I’ve noticed the trendy young mothers at school are wearing Birkenstock orthopaedic sandals, that foot fetish is over. My decision to shell out $130 for a pair of cork clogs is the tipping point that declares them passé.

Proudly wearing my new Birkies outside class, I spot several willowy mums having their tetes-a-tetes in their new season zebra-print ballet flats. I flinch, but this is nothing new. I have spent a lifetime trotting at the heels of trend-setters.

Of course by next summer, cork thongs will be ‘in’ again, but I’m a laggard. Cool people know when to deviate from the manual. I don’t.

Over the years, I have tried to be cool. But the very act of trying is a guarantee of failure. Only once did I succeed – age 26 – by accident. After moving to Sydney in the midst of a steamy summer, I began taking long walks around my new city wearing ankle-grazing floral sundresses and Blundstone boots. I rode the crest of Bohemian cool for an entire weekend.

 I have often fantasised about parting a sea of admirers with my ‘indefinable something,’ and hearing people whisper in my wake: “Look at that! She’s got it!” Instead, I clumsily part crowds with a stroller festooned with lumpish bags of groceries. My darting toddler has only two speeds: accelerating and flat out. My scooterised 6-year-old gives chase, as pedestrians scatter for safety. Twelve-year-old son walks three paces behind hoping no-one will guess he belongs to this vagabond family.

My eldest son and I used to be inseparable. He idolised me, and I was captivated by his boyish charms. Now he’s like a boyfriend I’ve grown tired of, but feel obligated to keep. We have rare moments of the old magic, but mostly I can’t remember what I saw in him. He now maintains a veneer of cheesed-off indifference, and I scrabble to keep him connected to the family flock.

 I have tried pointing out to him that every generation thinks it’s cooler than the one before. “Yeah right!” he grunts. I’ve even suggested that he become a trailblazer at school by resurrecting the 80’s exclamation Mint! with his mates. I tell him: “It’s such a great word honey! It even feels cool saying it…. Mint! And you know what? When everyone’s saying Mint! you can start saying Mintox! That’s for things beyond Mint!” He sighs and shakes his head: “Yep Mum, that’s a fully sick idea, one of your best.” Then he adds: “Please don’t come to Assembly this week. I can’t stand the embarrassment.”

If I had street cred, everyone would want to talk like me and that would be Mint!  Lacking street cred, I pretend to be hip on Facebook instead.

Social media has done cool people a disservice – it levels the playing field by allowing everyone to appear at their best. Facebook is an illusion – it encourages users to showcase only their prettiest, wittiest side. On Facebook, we can all be sophisticates posting our snappiest thoughts and most flattering photos. My cool friends say Facebook has had its day.

And so has Twitter, says my 14-year-old God-daughter: “Who does Twitter anymore?” she scowls, “It’s so, like, dumb.” Then she rolls her eyes at me: “Don’t you get it? When the Mums start doing it, it’s so, like – over.” 

My bookclub, however, is still avant-garde after thirteen years. Twelve of us meet every six weeks to escape the twenty-seven offspring we have outputted since our club started. (We gave up reading the designated book years ago – Bridget Jones’ Diary had became an annoying distraction to the more fascinating minutiae of each others’ lives).

In 2007, when I was pregnant, I discovered that one book club girlfriend was on Twitter before I even knew what Twitter was. It sounded like a cult but I could tell it was cool. She could tell me fascinating insider stories about how Apple almost called the iPhone the TelePod. The only fascinating thing I could think to tell her was that I had a crush on my obstetrician. “No way!” she said. “Yes way!” I continued, “And I think he’s secretly in love with me too. When I’m on the examination table, he always catches my eye and smiles down at me through the gaps in the stirrups.””You dope,” she said, “He bats for the other side,” and sashayed off to fill her glass. I felt decidedly uncool.

I’ve decided the essence of cool, is indifference. And I am never indifferent. Instead, I made sure I married a man so laid back that at least my offspring have a 50-percent chance of being cool. And if the gene pool fails them, I’ll tell them to be proud of a mother who was uncool before uncool was cool.