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My life as a part time freelance writer and full time mother is about as far from glamorous as you can get. About as close as I can come is paging through the latest In Style magazine while watching The Wiggles on Disney Channel for the umpteenth time. Steven Cojocaru, on the other hand, lives, breathes and eats glamour on a spoon. His dishy new memoir, RED CARPET DIARIES: Confessions of a Glamour Boy, gives us --- the great unwashed --- some insight into just how someone pursues glamour at all costs, even --- some might say --- sanity.
Steven Cojocaru is the fashion correspondent for the Today show on NBC and is also the West Coast Style Editor for People magazine. This gives him free reign to indulge his inner diva and wax weekly on the high priestesses of American style --- a more feminine and much more flamboyant Joan Rivers. Since I picked up this book in the middle of a dreary winter, I hoped it would provide a break from both the weather and aforementioned toddler. While it is wickedly funny in parts, let me say that a little bit of Steven goes a long way and the book is only 192 pages long, if you get my drift.
"I am journalism's equivalent of a cheese soufflé," Steven proclaims after reporting on one of his many jobs. The book reads as a series of episodes in a "whacked out" (his words) life. If you cannot recall ever seeing Steven, you should picture a cross between Aerosmith's lead singer Steven Tyler and Mick Jagger with Valerie Bertinelli's hair. Oh, and don't mention hair. Throughout the book, we are treated to an in-depth analysis of Steven's hair (Cojocaru's, not Tyler's, although that might have been interesting). I felt like I was trapped at an eighth grade girl's slumber party. To say Steven dresses flamboyantly is like saying it is cold at the North Pole: knee-length white fur coats, leather pants, "white gauzy balloon drawstring pants" and oversize Jackie O sunglasses. And that was at his bar mitzvah. No, no, just kidding, the bar mitzvah outfit was more like a powder blue tuxedo with a blue ruffled shirt. Perhaps this is at the root of his weirdness.
The book is not all outfit analysis as we do learn a little about his childhood in Montreal, where he grew up the son of Romanian immigrants who seem very supportive of Steven and his, uh, uniqueness. Probably to no one's surprise but his own, little Steven was often taunted by the other kids who just could not appreciate the fashion sense of a boy who would wear supersize bell bottom pants, a clingy disco shirt and wooden clogs to the playground in 5th grade. He met with greater approval in high school as he was ushered into the inner circle of popular girls, because he could dish and give fashion advice with the best of them.
Fast forward a few years and Steven is still doing the same thing, albeit on a much grander scale. Starting out with small Hollywood outlets and eventually working his way up to People and The Joan Rivers Show, Steven doesn't hold anything back. We hear who the naughty celebrities are (Barbra Streisand, although it pained him to have to say it) and who is nice (Katie Couric and the rest of the Today show gang). I found the celebrity sections much more appetizing than the treatises on his hair problems and how hard it is to figure out what underwear to wear on the red carpet for the Oscars. Did you know they made male thongs? Neither did I.
RED CARPET DIARIES: Confessions of a Glamour Boy is the book equivalent of a cocktail party. Steven makes the rounds and has a few nibbles, but it's really nothing of substance. But then again, all work and no play would make Steven a very dull, yet glamorous, boy.
--- Reviewed by Shannon Bloomstran
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