Grenrock Woods, Stacey 1968- (Stacey Dee Grenrock)

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Grenrock Woods, Stacey 1968- (Stacey Dee Grenrock)

PERSONAL:

Born Stacey Dee Grenrock on November 22, 1968, in Los Angeles, CA; married Kenny Woods, 1999. Education: Attended California State University at Northridge.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Los Angeles, CA.

CAREER:

Writer and actress. Sex columnist for Esquire magazine, coeditor of L.A. Innuendo magazine; has appeared on many television shows, including The Daily Show, Arrested Development, Fat Actress, The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson, and The Awards Show Awards Show.

WRITINGS:

I, California: The Occasional History of a Childhood Actress, Tap Dancer, Record Store Clerk, Thai Waitress, Playboy Reject, Nightclub Booker, Daily Show Correspondent, Sex Columnist, Recurring Character, Etc., Scribner (New York, NY), 2007.

Contributor of articles to magazines, including Allure, O, the Oprah Magazine, and Utne Reader.

SIDELIGHTS:

Writer and actress—or "wractress" as she sometimes calls herself—Stacey Grenrock Woods lived a colorful existence before ascending to television stardom as a correspondent for the fake news show The Daily Show with Jon Stewart in the late 1990s. Since then she has appeared on a number of television shows, including the critically acclaimed Arrested Development (with her childhood acquaintance Jason Bateman), and served as a writer for the MTV Music Awards. More recently she has served as the sex columnist for Esquire magazine. She was born and raised in Sherman Oaks, ground zero of Southern California's hip San Fernando Valley, where she honed her sense of irony and humor while working in a record store, waitressing, and acting. Her youth, from the bad fashions of the 1970s to the big-hair, glam-rock 1980s to the self-mocking sarcasm of the 1990s and beyond, provide the fodder for her memoir I, California: The Occasional History of a Childhood Actress, Tap Dancer, Record Store Clerk, Thai Waitress, Playboy Reject, Nightclub Booker, Daily Show Correspondent, Sex Columnist, Recurring Character, Etc.

Grenrock Woods recounts her first thirty-some years in California during which she participated in nearly every fad and every zeitgeist moment that came along. She posed for Playboy, she booked bands for the notorious Viper Room nightclub (owned by movie star Johnny Depp), worked at a record shop, waitressed at a Thai fusion restaurant, had a couple of abortions, and eventually married a music producer. She revels in the shallowness of Hollywood culture and lambastes the sterile shopping milieu of her suburban upbringing, loving it and loathing it equally. The result, wrote Charlotte Benedetto in Baltimore's City Paper, is that Grenrock Woods has become "a full-grown, organically transformed, former Valley Girl."

The author name-drops through the decades, recounts the free lunch she received during her nude photo shoot for Playboy, and traverses the Midwest in search of vulnerable, gullible, and possibly psychotic oddballs to interview for The Daily Show. Concurrently, she keeps a running commentary on the antidepressant medications and other less-legal substances that lubricated her encounters with the hoi polloi and the dregs of society alike. In the end, I, California is "superlatively readable" but shallow, wrote Benedetto. The book "is lousy with puns, brand names, charming obsessions, and fast-moving little anecdotes," recounted while "enchanting, caustic phrases come and go, dancing sweetly, then disappear like readable tap-jazz class frenemies," she concluded. Allison Block, writing in Booklist, considered Grenrock Woods's stories to be "often mean-spirited," but a reviewer for Esquire called the book "intelligent, insightful, self-deprecating, and charming." A writer for Kirkus Reviews appreciated the author's "multiple levels of irony" from which "a complete emotional meltdown is always lurking just behind the waves of cultural zeitgeist humor."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Booklist, July 1, 2007, Allison Block, review of I, California: The Occasional History of a Childhood Actress, Tap Dancer, Record Store Clerk, Thai Waitress, Playboy Reject, Nightclub Booker, Daily Show Correspondent, Sex Columnist, Recurring Character, Etc., p. 20.

Esquire, July 2007, review of I, California, p. 20.

Kirkus Reviews, June 1, 2007, review of I, California.