Vicki Larson's Page

It’s October, and so the Halloween decorations have taken over. So I was admiring the windows in some of the stores downtown, the pumpkins and witches and scarecrows, when I walked by the lingerie shop. Along with the lacy La Perla bras and Hanky Panky panties were some manikins wearing costumes — a French maid, a Marie Antoinette-like French getup (but with a lacy miniskirt), etc.

That’s often how we women dress on Halloween — we flaunt our sexuality, whether as a French maid or a nurse or a s… Continue

If Elizabeth Gilbert did it again, why wouldn't all divorced/widowed women?

Marry again, that is.

The author of the best-selling memoir, "Eat, Pray, Love," eventually marries "that guy" she met in the "love" portion of the book. She details all in her about-to-be published book, "Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage."

But she marries him because she must — he's about to be deported for good.

Now, most of us don't marry a second time because of that, although I know people who’ve ma… Continue

It would seem that Levi Johnston’s 15 minutes of fame would have come and gone by now. Once his would-be mother-in-law, Sarah Palin, lost her bid for vice president, you’d have expected that the somewhat hunky, hockey-playing, self-described “f-ing red neck” former boyfriend of Bristol Palin would have settled into his normal life in Wasalia, Alaska, doing whatever it is they do up there. After all, he’s not really famous for anything other than knocking up his teenage girlfriend.

I supp… Continue

Families are odd, odd things.

There are a lot of things you can control in life and a lot you can’t. The family you’re born into is one of the “can’t” things. I always thought that everyone else’s family was a bit more “normal” than mine.

For the longest time I didn’t realize that no one else tore paper napkins in half (to make the 260-count package last even longer? Who knows?); that other families weren’t watching black-and-white TVs whose screen was split in half, with one half showing what… Continue

When I heard about the death of Maria del Carmen Brousada, the 69-year-old single mother who made the news three years ago by becoming the oldest woman in the world to give birth, I was transported back to the summer I turned 8.

My family had gone to visit relatives in Israel. For whatever reason, my parents thought I was too young to join them and my sister, then 11, to Eliat, the southernmost tip, so they left for a long weekend with those relatives.

The day they left, my relatives — who bar… Continue