Commentary Archive — Karen Stabiner

I live in Seattle, just west of Los Angeles.

SEPTEMBER 28, 2023

The bike path is lovely in September, first thing in the morning, the fog thick and low, the waterfront deserted. In TruSeattle, way up north, it is ninety degrees and sunny, but in NuSeattle, the town formerly known as Santa Monica, in otherwise sunny southern California, it is grey and cool. Last weekend it rained, both mornings.

We used to be able to cope, back when this coastal weather pattern ended in June; in fact, we were so smug about paradise that we gave a funny nickname to the one less than perfect month. June Gloom meant thirty cloudy days interrupted by a couple of hours of late afternoon sun if we got lucky. That was okay. We had the rest of the summer to look forward to bright sun, ocean breezes, and no need for air conditioning.

How will the movies tell our stories if neighborhood restaurants are gone?

DECEMBER 30, 2020, The Counter

Subtract restaurant scenes from your favorite movies and the world gets a whole lot duller—but that sound you hear is tomorrow’s memorable locations shutting their doors for good.

I was raised to believe that good food came in store-bought packages, but homemade jam got me through quarantine summer

SEPTEMBER 29, 2020, The Counter

My mom was a decent cook, but my, how she loved convenience. Anything frozen or prepackaged, to make dinner easier, and anything store-bought for dessert. She was hardly lazy; that wasn’t it. She was scared of dirt, the kind that clings to food that grows, which surely contained a germ or tiny bug that would kill us all. I do not exaggerate.

Romancing the stone

MAY 2, 2018, The New York Times

This is the first of five articles, written from the perspective of one mother of the bride.

Jesse wants to meet me for coffee, and I bet I know why. What I don’t know is why I’m not prepared.

Of course he intends to propose to my daughter, Sarah; the news is merely that it’s imminent. Of course she’ll say yes. Even I, with my perfervid imagination, cannot concoct a scenario in which she turns him down. I’ve had plenty of time to think of the right thing to say, and yet all I can manage is a hug and a “mazel tov,” since Yiddish seems to be the default language for monumental good news when I’m otherwise speechless.

No seat in the fitting room for me

MAY 17, 2018, The New York Times

This is the second of five articles, written from the perspective of one mother of the bride.

Sarah is on the other side of a heavy white curtain with Michael, a genial young man with precision stubble. I am not allowed to join them. Mothers are not welcome in wedding-dress fitting rooms, it seems, not even in rooms as large as this one. With a practiced gesture, Michael herded Sarah and a bunch of dresses into the room and pulled the curtain shut behind him. I’m on the exile side before I can open my mouth to protest.

It’s not like I was going to make trouble, you know. I would’ve sat quietly on that little straight-backed chair, because after all, what is a fitting-room chair for if not to be sat on?

It’s their wedding, and their wedding planning

MAY 31, 2018, The New York Times

This is the third of five articles, written from the perspective of one mother of the bride.

You may think you have her figured out: A woman of a certain age sits at a garden table in the waning hours of a Brooklyn Sunday brunch, reading a book while she finishes her meal. She considers the dappled sunlight filtered through the leaves, takes her time enjoying each bite, dawdles over her coffee. She lingers to jot a line or two in a tiny notebook. You might assume that she uses journal as a verb.

All that a mother-of-bride dress reveals, inside and out

JUNE 14, 2018, The New York Times

This is the fourth of five articles, written from the perspective of one mother of the bride.

If the first set of wedding dresses was beyond our budget, the second set is beyond belief, and we take refuge in ridicule to keep from getting depressed. In a single store in a single hour, Sarah tries on the Downton Abbey dress, the Roaring Twenties dress, and a cupcake number I dub the Operation Petticoat dress.

Doubt has sneaked into the fitting room even if I cannot, so I smile the confident smile that parents paste on when we assure our kids about things we can’t possibly yet know. Of course you’ll like the new school, the math teacher, Latin, your college roommate, college in general, sushi.

A wedding day saga ends with words from the heart

JUNE 27, 2018, The New York Times

This is the fifth of five articles, written from the perspective of one mother of the bride.

It has come to this: 10:30 on a Saturday night and I sit cross-legged on the hotel room floor inside a silken tent, the skirt of Sarah’s dress four inches from my face, the delicate overskirt draped over my head. I steamed the overskirt with my new portable hand-held steamer, the one I practiced with at home to make sure it didn’t sputter. Once I got into a nice rhythm, I figured I’d do the skirt, too.

I vow to not jinx the Cubs by watching even one game

OCTOBER 27, 2016, Chicago Sun-Times

The goat's got nothing on me.

It's 1984 – we all remember 1984 – and I've just moved into a house with the man who in three months will become my husband. He's one of those Cubs fans who can rattle off batting averages and specific plays. Me, I just love the Cubbies. I grew up in Skokie; it was the only option.

Reno's retirement

Los Angeles Magazine

I have never been an absolutist about relationships, but four years ago, when we acquired a horse, I was adamant about how this had to end. I told our twelve-year-old daughter that the day she went to college, he would go back to the sale barn he came from, to be sold to the next little girl who was ready to fall in love. A horse was a big financial stretch for us, but we told ourselves we could handle it, in great part because we knew the effort was finite.

A proper greeting (and it isn't 'Hey')

JANUARY 13, 2013, The Los Angeles Times

Hey, reader.

If you bristle ever so slightly at the presumed familiarity of that salutation, you're almost surely over 40, and you likely grew up well north of the Mason-Dixon line.

If you say "hey" back, the demographic possibilities are a lot broader. Everyone from anywhere who was born after 1980 seems to have adopted this onetime Southern regionalism, as have over-40s who work in a business that uses "trending" as a verb and requires them to stay forever young.

Summer cooking : The corn chronicles

Los Angeles Times

One man, who eats complicated foods and sophisticated wines, confessed that, for all the extravagant dishes he has sampled, he has always longed to taste fresh corn.

A realist asked me what I would do if the kernels didn't form properly, and for a moment I imagined myself the heroine of an O'Henry short story, sneaking out in the dead of night to paste a healthy ear of supermarket corn on the stalk, to spare Sarah the heartbreak of an inedible ear.

A VW van for your feet

Los Angeles Times

You had to have been there. For less than 40 bucks — maybe 30, who remembers? — a weird and compelling pair of sandals, nothing more than natural leather straps crisscrossed on top of a fat suede platform, with a name straight out of an orthopedic shoe catalog: Kork-Ease. They took a certain segment of the female population by storm in the 1970s, and now they're back, the price adjusted for inflation, you bet.

As blue jeans fade, so does individuality

Los Angeles Times

Listen, the car dealer in my neighborhood has a great deal on a new Mercedes. It's got everything — a ding in the left rear bumper, a little crumple in the front grill, a paint scrape on the driver's door, a missing hubcap — and he's only going to charge an extra $4,000 for all those custom touches.

This president gets a 'No' vote

Los Angeles Times

Too much prime-time soap opera, not enough reality 'Commander in Chief' is not the distaff White House of feminist dreams.

First, the disclaimer: My husband, teenage daughter and I are inveterate watchers of "The West Wing." Having had quite enough of the reality series that is the Bush administration, we have for years used "The West Wing" as both our escape and an ongoing current-events tutorial.

What Yale women want

Los Angeles Times

If the last generation of women obsessed about cracking the glass ceiling, a new crop of college undergrads seems less interested in the professional stratosphere than in a soft — a cushy — landing.

The New York Times recently got its hands on a Yale University questionnaire in which 60% of the 138 female respondents said that they intend to stop working when they have children, and then to work part time, if at all, once the kids are in school.

The rise and fall of the female waistband

Los Angeles Times

Is there a mother anywhere in the United States who has not had an argument with her daughter over a waistband — or rather, the lack of one? A walk down any retailer's aisle presents an array of jeans that come to a screeching halt a full latitude shy of the waist. They seem to defy the laws of gravity, except when they don't, and we're treated to more information about a stranger's taste in underwear — brand, color and size — than we might have wanted to know.

Girls want the media to shape up

Los Angeles Times

The television series "Fat Actress" is like a yo-yo diet. Kirstie Alley looks blissful in the credits, boogieing with an abandon that covers entire ZIP Codes - but what about those Jenny Craig ads that reassure us about how much weight she's losing? A fat actress isn't really happy, it seems, unless she's headed for thin.

Everywhere we look, we see the contradictions of a culture obsessed with women and weight: Big is beautiful, as long as it's not too big; you can't be too rich or too thin, but please, honey, don't be anorexic. Emphatically skinny is still in, but fat has achieved a certain political correctness; it's been redefined as a healthy rejection of the undernourished look.

Send her to the ash heap

Los Angeles Times

It is time to retire Cinderella. The penniless gal saved by a handsome prince has been a Hollywood favorite ever since Disney's animated version hit the screen in 1950, but "The Prince & Me," the latest retread, proves that the story has run out of steam. The target audience -- tween-age and teenage girls -- stayed away from it in droves, as well as from several other recent versions of the once-unassailable myth. What used to work doesn't anymore, confounding executives who await the release of this summer's fairy tales with growing apprehension.

Can separate ever be equal? For girls, answer isn't simple

Los Angeles Times

For more than 30 years, Title IX has prohibited gender discrimination at any school that receives federal funding. We think of it as the legislation that led to parity in athletic programs, but Title IX did much more than that: Among other things, it prohibited single-sex classes in public schools unless there was documented proof of inequity in the coed classroom.

Last week, that changed. The Bush administration issued revised Title IX guidelines that will allow single-sex public schools and classes. Separate but equal seems to be staging a comeback, at least where gender is concerned.

The trouble with 'girl trouble'?

Chron.

If girls are made of sugar and spice, the spice must be hot pepper flakes--or so it would seem from the run of bad press they have received this summer. A spate of new books tells us our daughters are mean or aspiring to be, sexually aggressive or about to be, wilder than we want to think, downright nasty and as self- doubting as ever. We seem particularly eager to read about the mess we have made: Check any bestseller list and you will find teen girls in trouble.

Sarah's party dress

Los Angeles Times

It looked to me like the right dress. Calf length, shimmery enough for a party dress, big flowers splashed all over and a demure white collar and cuffs. It had the sort of full skirt that spun when an 8-year-old twirled around, always the deal maker for my daughter. The saleswoman offered to hold it until I picked up Sarah from school. I figured this whole dress issue would be retired before dinner.