femail from la

I recently picked up the June issue of Femina, a general interest magazine for women, published in South Africa. This one had Helen Hunt on the cover along with some features on what to wear this winter, the second part in a “gripping” series called Diary of a Divorce, making more time for yourself (as always), schools not being up to standard, and the promise of Margaret Gardiner telling about her life in Los Angeles!

Ms. Gardiner is a former Miss Universe and was the first winner of Miss RSA (not to be confused with Miss SA please) somewhere in the sixties or seventies.

I’ve always liked her. She always seemed like such a nice and pleasant lady. Someone like my mother perhaps, with a title of course.

I decided to look at some other features first and then spoil myself by reading about Ms. Gardiner’s life in LA.

I got bored with the Diary of a Divorce pretty quickly so I turned to page 38 for the Fe-mail from Los Angeles. A fe-mail is an email from a female reader living abroad that gets published each month (is the opposite of a fe-mail a he-mail, and what about trans-gendered people?). Each month a different person gets to tell about her and her family’s life in some foreign destination.

Usually a fe-mail is only about half a page. But this particular one was a whole two pages long. How lucky for me as reader and slight fan of Ms. Gardiner!

Not very, it seemed. I got almost halfway through the article before the magazine got flung against the opposite wall.

What Ms. Gardiner wrote and the way she wrote it was downright offensive and clichéd. It was possibly the worst thing I tried to read in a very long time. I’ve had a better time reading speech bubbles in Heat.

She starts of her letter by carrying on how fake the women in LA are. You know the tits the faces, the tans, the hair, the cars…

Then she explains how she moved there with her husband on account of his work and how they decided to stay there because their son needed to get into an exclusive private school.

Nice.

Next the dear former Miss Universe informs us about what she is currently busy with (hosting TV shows or some such thing) and does not let the opportunity slip by to mention that she has published two books. Winning in Modeling and Beauty Competitions and The Complete Health and Beauty Book. This is followed by more irrelevant tidbits about her past. How she was discovered at a very young age and became Miss Universe at age 18 and so on.

‘Enough about me,’ she thought and started telling us about how she is surrounded by stars in LA. You know, there are all these famous parents’ kids in her son’s school. She mentioned a couple of parents’ names, but kind of lost the plot when it came to Lisa Kudrow, “Also Phoeboe from Friends has her kid there.”

This is followed by the following, “ I used to be a star so I know what it’s like and I’m glad I’m not one anymore.” Her non-star status must be what bought her a two-page spread in Femina for her Fe-mail!

So now she jumps back to how difficult it has been to leave SA and its culture (because we only have one) and how people in LA don’t get truly South African jokes (you lie!- they don’t have van der Merwe jokes outside of SA???) and how she cannot help her son with baseball.

But she could help him with basketball. She forked out thousands of dollars to get him to attend some basketball thing with Michael Jordan and in the end the kid became this super basketball kid at his school. Of course, she does not feel bad about having to spend so much money on her kid (at least its not her tits right?) because, “it’s what everyone does”.

Now she informs us about how well South Africans does in the States and how the principle at her son’s “R110 000 a year school” is from SA. There is Charlize Theron, "enough said." And oh the stars just love SA! She gets this information from little chats with Jared Leto and Harrison Ford.

Here the former Miss Universe jumps from Jared Leto to her nephew who is a hunk and very tall who came to visit. On his visit she took him to all the right places. And of course she spends quite an amount of words on pointing out how fake all the right places are. Oh and they saw Natalie Portman eating a hamburger, but nobody looked because apparently everybody is tired of looking. Good god.

She also mentions what a nice guy George Clooney is because he is no snob and is “surprisingly smart”. Yes, quote-unquote.

She complains how hard it is to keep things real and how she has nightmares about having fakes tits and all and then waking up in cold sweats and calling her mother. And how they then get to talk about things that are real like Table Mountain and her nephew (I’m guessing the hunky one).

And then she thanks God for being so fortunate to have grown up in a real place, with real people, and real morals. Like Cape Town.

For real.