Esther Kustanowitz: April 2008 Archives

Speaking of incarcerated celebs, yesterday TMZ reported that actor Wesley Snipes is going to jail.. In February, the "Blade" star was tried on eight charges--acquitted on five of them, he was convicted of three counts of willful failure to file a return. Those three counts will translate into three years, the AP reported on Thursday.

While Snipes' attorneys argued it was just $228,000 that the actor owed and suggested a lenient sentence, the government claimed he owed $2.7 million and prosecutors pressed for the maximum sentence of three years in prison. Snipes procured character reference letters from Woody Harrelson and Denzel Washington (I guess hoping that the guys who portrayed Larry Flynt and Malcolm X would be persuasive) but to no avail.

But for the rarest of relationships, for any parent and child sitting down to talk about sex is uncomfortable on both ends. Maybe it's supposed to be that way. But the talk has to happen or a child will get the information--or misinformation--from somewhere else, the general Wikipedia-style body of collective and often biased, occasionally untrue void that is popular American culture.

Author Anna Broadway knows about the awkwardness, and writes a blog, Sexless in the City, that has become a book of the same name. In it, she writes her memoir of "reluctant chastity," and shares stories of growing up Christian and an incurable romantic. In a recent appearance on ABC7News out in the Bay Area, Broadway shares some tips for how to broach this important, but anxiety-ridden topic with your teens.

A rabbi and a Muslim walk into a restaurant, garbed in a kippah and a skullcap, respectively. Both are religious educators, but this isn't a formal summit on religious education in America--it's a reunion between Charlie Buckholtz and Sedar Chappelle, old friends from Silver Spring, MD who, as adults have found that their religious differences give them much food for thought and discussion.

And if Sedar's surname sounds familiar, it's because he has a famous brother you might have heard of. Charlie knows Sedar and Dave (then David) since childhood--the Chappelles even attended Charlie's bar mitzvah.

Rapper Foxy Brown just finished serving time (8 months in Rikers) for smacking a Brooklyn neighbor with her BlackBerry. While that might not sound like a prisonworthy offense, it was a violation of her probation, which itself was the result of her arrest for attacking two nail-salon workers in Chelsea during a manicure argument in 2006. Plus, the smackee had been left with a swollen lip, black eye, and loose teeth, as a result of the attack. (With Russell Crowe's chucking a cell phone at someone a year or so back, one cannot help but wonder if "cellphone is the new Glock.")

While Foxy described prison as an "atrocity," she notes the importance of prayer in getting her through it. "Night and day, I had nothing else to do but pray."

David and Victoria Beckham are already not your typical L.A. couple. He's insanely hot and talented and famous. She's insanely skinny and talented (at being skinny and posh) and famous. (OK, so maybe that's a bit typical. But wait, there's another point.) They defected from England to the States, the opposite of the American celebrity norm (see also, Gwyneth and Madonna). They became adherents of Kabbalah and had verses from the Song of Songs tattooed on their bodies ("I am my beloved's and my beloved is mine," the inkings read).

Still, while it won't surprise anyone that the immensely wealthy and privacy-concerned Beckhams want to give their kids the best education in a private school type environment, it might surprise local Jewish Angelenos if there are Goldsteins and Beckhams sharing fingerpaints at nursery school.

Every year, Jews celebrate Passover, the Festival of Freedom, often using the opportunity to reflect on the meaning of the holiday's themes: oppression, freedom, and liberation. When I was growing up, our synagogues and schools urged us to remember the...

I'm a recently born fan of the HBO show "Big Love," now in its third season, which focuses on a polygamous (they are very careful not to say "Mormon") family in Utah. The twist is that the family--husband, three wives,...

I'm pretty gullible, so for me the problem with April Fool's Day is that I suspect everything with a date of April 1. Back in the days when I wrote memos, I would actually pre or post-date them so that...

If you're tired of the same cheerleader stereotypes--Jaime Pressly, Kirsten Dunst and Hayden Panettiere, I'm looking at you--then you'll want to catch a ticket to see the Florida Marlins' new cheerleading squad, the Manatees. If that doesn't sound like the...

Oh, celebrities! What won't they do for beauty and youth? If they're willing to inject their faces with botulism or get lipo'd during a lunch hour or wear red strings/study Kabbalah, why should anything as natural as a good leeching...

Mighty Aphrodite! About eleven months ago, denizens of New York's Lower East Side were tickled and surprised to see an iconic image of Woody Allen (from the film "Annie Hall") being used in an American Apparel ad. (Idol Chatter covered...