The “Glee” gang heads toward graduation
January 18, 2012 § Leave a comment
“Glee” has rounded the corner to the second half of its third season. As Rachel, Finn, Kurt and other New Directions members contemplate life after McKinley High, I continue to chart their high school heartaches and hard choices in the Los Angeles Times’ TV blog, Showtracker. Will Finn and Rachel marry? Will New Directions thwart that villain Sebastian and beat Dalton’s Warblers at Regionals? I, for one, can’t wait to find out.
Showtracker: “Glee” recaps (Los Angeles Times)
“The X Factor” crowns a winner
December 23, 2011 § Leave a comment
It took many “X Factor” viewers a long time to forgive judge Simon Cowell for sending the show’s eventual winner, Melanie Amaro, home early in the show’s first season — only to dramatically bring her back again — but Amaro said she didn’t find it difficult to let Cowell off the hook for his mistake. “He was so sincere about coming back to my house and apologizing about everything that I could not stay mad at all,” she told me during a conference call the day after her big win. “I mean, I was hurt at first, but I forgave and forgot and let go. I really made peace with it.”
So what does the 19-year-old singer plan to do with her $5 million “X Factor” payday? “I’m definitely going to buy myself a foot massager and buy my mom a new house,” she said.
You can read more of what Amaro had to say here and find my full coverage of season one of “The X Factor” (lots and lots of recaps) in the Los Angeles Times here.
Showtracker: “The X Factor” recaps (Los Angeles Times)
A parent, yes, but not only that
November 30, 2011 § Leave a comment
Every once in a while, life throws at you a moment that shifts your perspective as if someone has bumped your viewfinder, leaving you scrambling to refocus. These moments, by definition, happen when you least expect them. I had one while sitting in my hairdresser’s chair.
I was making conversation, as one does, with this woman who’d been cutting my hair for a few years, and she started rattling off the reasons she loved the location of her Brooklyn storefront shop. “I get all sorts of different kinds of customers,” she said. “Artists, writers, dancers, actresses, lawyers, businesswomen …”
When I replay this part in my mind, as I often do, I always pause for a split-second to prepare for what I was unprepared for at the time.
“… moms.” …
Don’t Call Me a Mom (Newsweek/Daily Beast)
No more Ms. Nice Guy
October 20, 2011 § Leave a comment
For years, I tried to be a very nice person at work—a dream colleague, a team player, the sort of woman who gave women a good name in the workplace. I thanked people. I apologized. I expressed concern. I took responsibility for making things right, even when I wasn’t the one who had made them go wrong. Then one day I looked up from my under-challenging, midlevel job and noticed that my boss, who was generally regarded as kind of a jerk, but a smart and talented one, never, ever thanked people. He never apologized. And he didn’t appear to give a rip about what was going on in the lives of anyone around him. He never took responsibility when things went wrong, preferring instead to label someone else the culprit and chew them out.
It suddenly occurred to me: he had gained responsibility, power and a big, cushy salary not despite the fact that he was a jerk, but because of it …
Why Being a Jerk at Work Pays (Newsweek/Daily Beast)
Stirring things up
October 4, 2011 § Leave a comment
My take on timely parenting and health issues and breaking news? I give it to readers straight on CafeMom’s The Stir. This blog parses news and current events from a parent’s perspective — and gets readers talking about everything from the latest health studies to the latest antics of our favorite celebrities to the concerns and joys of parenting. A fun mix, to be sure.
The Stir blog posts (Cafe Mom)
A first foray into e-books
September 28, 2011 § Leave a comment
Who has it worse: stay-at-home moms, work-at-home moms or moms who work outside the house? There are as many answers to that question as there are mothers in the world. Editor Sarah Bryden-Brown has compiled 13 of those myriad answers (one of them mine) in a new e-book called “Welcome to My World.” In it, you’ll find evidence that the struggle to balance the demands (and rewards) of family with the demands (and rewards) of career includes no easy answers – just temporary solutions for how to get through each day without doing irreparable damage to our children, our identities, our aspirations and our ability to pull in a paycheck. The life of the working parent (and all parents are working parents) isn’t always easy, but downloading this highly readable e-book for Kindle or Nook is. My essay is called “Momming in the Middle” and it can be found, appropriately enough, about midway through the collection.
Does America, in fact, have talent?
June 17, 2011 § Leave a comment
Now that “American Idol” and “Glee,” which I recapped for the Los Angeles Times, have wrapped up their seasons (read my takes on the season finales here and here), what am I doing with all my free time? Recapping “America’s Got Talent,” that’s what. Never having watched the popular NBC summer show before this season, I’m just getting used to the needling Howie Mandel-Sharon Osbourne-Piers Morgan judge dynamic, to the confounding combination of amateur and professional acts, and to the “Gong Show” and “Real People”/”That’s Incredible!” flashbacks from my youth. (Where are the Unknown Comic and Gene Gene the Dancing Machine when you need them?) If only Nick Cannon could master the Chuck Barris fake clap ….
Showtracker: “America’s Got Talent” recaps (Los Angeles Times)
I read the news so you don’t have to
June 14, 2011 § Leave a comment
If you don’t have time to read all the day’s news, don’t worry. You can read (or better yet, bookmark) my daily blog on MyDaily.com, 2 Minute Memo, which aims to give you all you need to know about the latest headlines — politics, health, entertainment and more — at a glance.
Steven Tyler makes some ‘Noise’
May 10, 2011 § Leave a comment
During a recent episode of “American Idol,” the popular TV talent show in which the famously foul-mouthed and flamboyant Aerosmith frontman Steven Tyler has reinvented himself as a family-friendly judge, host Ryan Seacrest good-naturedly stopped by the judging table to rib Tyler about his new book, “Does the Noise in My Head Bother You?”
“This book is not for the faint of heart,” Seacrest noted, adding, “You’ve really exposed yourself here. Is there any area you haven’t touched?”
Tyler dodged the question, but the answer may well be “no.” …
“Does the Noise In My Head Bother You?”: A rock star revealed (Salon)
The making of a modern family
April 28, 2011 § Leave a comment
No Biking in the House Without a Helmet, Melissa Fay Greene’s new book about life with her nine children—four biological, five adopted—is a more revealing, richer book than its cutesy-parenting title might lead you to expect. In it, Greene, a two-time National Book Award finalist, recounts with warmth and humor how she and her criminal defense attorney husband, Donny, came to adopt first a 4-year-old Romani boy from an orphanage in Bulgaria, and then a daughter and three sons from Ethiopia, absorbing each into their upper-middle-class, Jewish, Atlanta home. “This book is the story of the creation of a family,” she writes. “It began in the usual way: a woman, a man, some babies. But then it took off in a modern direction, roping in a few older children from distant countries.” …
Review: “No Biking in the House Without a Helmet” (The Barnes and Noble Review)
Amy Reiter 