Author: Starshine Roshell

Her thighs are clamped around his neck and her arms clutch urgently at his waist but it’s not what you think. In fact, it’s nothing you’ve ever thought about before.

It’s the preposterous sport of wife-carrying, in which overconfident men race through a short obstacle course while toting their dead-weight spouses on their backs or shoulders. Lady-laden, the athletes wobble over logs or hay bales, slog through shallow pools, and stagger across the finish line as hundreds of strangers hoot from the sidelines.

The grand prize: The missus’s weight in beer. Plus $5 for each pound she weighs. Plus the head-shaking befuddlement of most other humans.

Wife-carrying originated in Finland a mere 19 years ago, which means we can’t pass it off as the quaint hobby of eccentric ancients; my marriage is older than this sport, people. Fans mumble something about it harking back to the bad habits of Finnish bandits who abducted women from their villages and claimed them as wives — but Finland also hosts the world championships for Air Guitar and Mobile Phone Throwing, so I think it’s safe to assume the Finns just like silly stuff.

Annual wife-carrying competitions are now held in Australia and Hong Kong, and even here in the U.S. a police officer and his wife stumbled to victory just this month in Wisconsin with a race time of 60 seconds — which, he said, was the longest minute of his life, and his cargo weighed only 103 pounds.

Growing up in Tinsel Town, a gal gets jaded. Look, it can’t be helped. From before I could say “actors’ equity,” we lived directly beneath the glowing Hollywood sign. My folks were in “the industry” and hobnobbed with rock stars, deejays, and TV personalities. And by hobnobbed, of course, I mean got high and listened to album-oriented rock.

When you’ve watched soap-opera dreamboats flubbing their lines take after take, seen pop divas climbing into the makeup chair naked-faced and scowling, and heard Billboard chart-busters stinking up a sound check that should have ended hours ago — well, there’s little room left in your life for magic. (I once saw Dick Clark in his underwear, and it wasn’t even New Year’s Rockin’ Eve.)

All this to say that I grew up nearly incapable of reverence. Numb-ish to wonderment. And altogether apathetic toward the things that, as Americans, we’re supposed to venerate. Things like Thanksgiving, Walt Disney, the game of baseball, apple pie, railroad museums, and “our nation’s capital.”

Feh. Like Michigan, Alabama, and South Dakota, the District of Columbia isn’t somewhere I’d ever considered visiting. In fact, until this very month, I sort of believed “our nation’s capital” wasn’t a geographic reality so much as a vague mythical ideal like “nirvana” or “kingdom come” — you know, a literary conceit that helps establish tone and timbre when you’re waxin’ flashy in a tale about politics. Or House of Cards.

School’s out, and it’s a good thing, too — because across the world, young women are being kidnapped, raped, and shot to death while pursuing an education.

If that sounds shocking — terrific. I’m glad to know we haven’t yet become desensitized to the violence that female students are enduring. But we haven’t become sufficiently enraged about it, either. And that’s equally shocking. Remember when girls and women could go to school and expect to graduate unharmed? Here’s what’s happening now:

• There are 164 Nigerian girls missing after being abducted from their school in April by Islamic terrorists who oppose Western education and have threatened to sell the girls into sexual slavery.
• In the U.S., one in five women is being sexually assaulted during college, and more than 50 universities are being investigated by the Office for Civil Rights for mishandling sexual-assault cases on campus.
• And here in our progressive, civilized town, six people were murdered when an angry young guy embarked on a rampage to “punish all females for the crime of depriving me of sex.” The killer, whose name will never appear in a column of mine, left written rants about waging a “war on women.”

Every book club is good at something. Whipping up themed dinners, for example. Or planning out meeting schedules a year in advance. Or spotting motifs and allegories throughout a novel.

My book club is advanced at arguing.

In our decade of existence, we’ve quarreled over the time, day, format, and frequency of meetings. We’ve squabbled about hardcover versus paperback and Kindle versus iPad. We’ve gone toe-to-toe over who would play the main character in the movie version and whether it was fair to choose a book in which a child dies. Yes, that happened.

We once had a particularly squawky and even tearful meeting that is still affectionately referred to as Book Club Fight Club.

We’re an opinionated bunch, and I love that about us. Who wants a book group that’s too timid to tell you what they really felt about a bildungsroman — or worse, who felt nothing at all?

What we argue about most is endings. The 12 of us can work ourselves into a good, literary lather over a tome’s final pages: an off-kilter epilogue, a dissatisfying denouement, an outrageous resolution that leaves us locking horns over whether the author is a genuine Joyce-ian genius, or in fact lacks the depth god gave a bookmark.

I had “help” writing this column. At the recent launch party for my newest book of columns, Broad Assumptions, I held a contest inviting guests to submit the first and last lines of a column they’d like me to write — promising that I’d supply the middle part for the winning entry. Twenty-three people wrote suggestions, ranging from “My all-time most embarrassing moment is …” to “Thank God for duct tape!”

The crowd voted on the winner: an exacting couplet by vexingly imaginative reader Hattie Husbands. She won a set of my three books, and I walked away with the lines you see in bold below.

Last Saturday I was sitting in my kitchen sipping my coffee, when suddenly my cat turned and said to me …

“What the furball were you thinking?” my fictitious feline purred. “Writing a column that starts and ends with someone else’s words?! You know very well that you don’t have a cat — don’t even like cats — and certainly wouldn’t be talking to anyone before you’d finished your morning coffee. Meow the hell are you gonna write yourself out of this mess?”