Podcast host and fitness entrepreneur Steph Claire Smith has revealed she is taking part in a 30-day challenge unlike any other.
On her KICPOD podcast, which she hosts with her co-founder of Keep It Cleaner Laura Henshaw, the fitness entrepreneur revealed she and husband Josh Miller were taking part in a 30-day intimacy challenge.
“AKA 30 days of sex,” she said during the podcast.
“We are on Day 13, and I wanted to bring it up but I am sure I will have more to talk about at the end.”
Laura was shocked, jokingly asking Steph if she was tired before asking to define intimacy for the challenge.
Steph, mother to one-year-old son Harvey, said she and Josh have defined it by “further than kissing but doesn’t necessarily have to be sex”.
“We’re tired and there are dry spells but whenever we are intimate, it makes everything else better,” Steph said.
“As much as I hate to admit that, as there are times I just don’t want to do it, I know when I really think about it, when we are close in that way we are nicer to each other and more cuddly. ”
She said the pair were doing the challenge as a bit of a reset and initially had no idea how it was going to go.
Both Josh and Steph had seen it online but Josh was the one who suggested the couple take part.
The 28-year-old said the challenge wasn’t easy and the hardest part was finding the time.
“There are nights where it is a full-on task,” she said, adding that the couple would have to be smarter about scheduling time during the day before it gets too late at night.
“There have been days where we have had an argument and then we have to have sex,” she said.
“But in the back of our minds, we really want to do this for each other so we work through it.”
Laura joked that now her partner will want to take part and she doesn’t want to.
“Maybe you’ll inspire some – but I’m not,” Laura said.
The message for wannabe Sandy’s was simple. To be the ultimate fantasy and object of male desire you should be thin and blonde, kind and intelligent, come from a good home, wear ankle-length twin sets, respect your body and say no to boys trying to sexually pressure you while also being jaw-droppingly sexy and willing to drive men wild by wearing skin-tight outfits and red lipstick.
For those who looked to Rizzo, things were a little murkier. She was motivated by having fun instead of getting straight-A grades, disliked good girls, brought booze to sleepovers and snuck out windows when they got boring. She could be mean and cruel, but also cuttingly funny and self-aware as she proved in the wistful tune Worse Things I Could Do.
Newton-John’s sweet character Sandy had to learn to become sexy in Grease – a character arc the actor said she didn’t take too seriously.Credit:
As a kind of cautionary tale to girls who saw themselves in Rizzo, she was forced to endure being called “sloppy seconds” by Danny and faced her classmates gossiping about her potential teen pregnancy after she made the seemingly reckless decision to have unprotected sex with her boyfriend.
By the end of the film, though, Rizzo and Sandy are friends and as a reward for making peace with the good girl, Rizzo gets her man and her period.
Before her death, Newton-John discussed how the film had aged and Sandy’s role within that, telling ITV, “I know there were some criticisms about me wanting to change to be like him. It’s a movie and it’s a fun story and I have never taken that too seriously.”
Stockard Channing, who played Rizzo, called Sandy’s evolution of good girl gone bad “a moment of empowerment” for young women of the time and said her own character was “someone who enjoyed sex”, noting the inclusion of such a character onscreen in the 1970s was still relatively rare and positive for women.
So would a film that puts blonde beauty and virginity on a pedestal rake in $160 million at the box office today? Probably not. But would a storyline in which young women make their own decisions about their sexual desire and visual identities in spite of male attention still resonate? Absolutely.
For every nonsensical scene, like a middle-aged man appearing as an angel and telling a teenage girl to go back to high school to continue her studies in the doo-wop Beauty School Dropoutthere are thoroughly modern moments in characters like Mrs Murdoch, the school’s mechanic teacher, a woman who shows the boys everything they know about cars or Frenchy feeling lost about her future and not knowing what career path to take.
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Grease is a film that has somehow managed to last the distance not in spite of its dichotomies, but because of them. Just when you think its dated and reductive and gone too far, a character says or does something so forward-thinking it leaves you feeling shell-shocked. And before you have time to think about it, everybody has burst into song and dance. As a viewer, you find yourself oscillating between cringing one minute and joining the chorus the next. It doesn’t make sense, but maybe it doesn’t have to.
For all its flaws, it’s hard to imagine a world in which people won’t always be at least a little bit hopelessly devoted to greaseeven when its car inexplicably ascends into the clouds never to be seen again.
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Kevin Federline has leaked videos of Britney Spears seemingly telling her kids off.
The 40-year-old pop icon’s ex-husband recently claimed that their sons Preston, 16, and Jayden 15, haven’t seen their mother “for months”.
He claimed the boys had “decided” they didn’t want to see their mother or attend her recent wedding to Sam Asghari, and suggested the teenagers were embarrassed by her revealing Instagram posts.
The ‘Gimme More’ singer denied that her social media posts are anything to do with her not seeing them and branded the comments as “hurtful”.
And now, the feud has escalated after the 44-year-old former backup dancer posted – who was married to Britney between 2004 and 2007 – two clips of the mother-of-two allegedly rowing with her sons, and claimed that his boys gave him permission for the footage to be made public because “the lies have to stop”.
He captioned the videos on Instagram: “I cannot sit back and let my sons be accused in this way after what they’ve been through. As much as it hurts us, we decided as a family to post these videos.
“This isn’t even the worst of it. The lies have to stop. I hope our kids grow up to be better than this.”
The videos are poorly lit and filmed by the teenagers. Britney is also unaware she is being filmed.
In one of the clips, the ‘Toxic’ hitmaker asks her boys to “start respecting me”.
She says: “This is my house. If I want to come in here and give you lotion for your face because it’s coarse … y’all better start respecting me, are we clear?”
She smokes: “You all need to start treating me like a woman with worth. I am a woman, okay, be nice to me, do you understand?”
In another clip, they are in the car when Britney says she is “shocked” by something that one of her boys has done, before blaming it on him going through “puberty”, and then insisting she cares “more than you know”.
The ‘Womanizer’ singer shouts: “Have you lost your f****** mind? Have you lost your f****** mind?”
She goes on: “I do care. But I’m shocked as f*** with you but I don’t know what to do
“And I’m scared of you because you’re weird because you’re going through puberty. And I don’t know what to say. But I do care more than you know.”
The leaks came shortly after Britney claimed her sons were “hateful” towards her.
She wrote: “There’s being rude then there’s being HATEFUL.
“They would visit me, walk in the door, go straight to their room and lock the door!!!
“The MONITOR would tell me that he just likes to be in his room.
“I’m like why come visit me if they don’t even visit me !!! (sic)”
You’ll NEVER guess what TLC looks like now! Chilli, 51, and T-Boz, 52, have hardly aged as they make rare TV appearance ahead of national RnB Live tour in Australia
By Mary Mrad For Daily Mail Australia
Published: | Updated:
They skyrocketed to fame in the 1990s and went on to become one of the most iconic R&B groups in history.
And on Friday, Rozonda Chilli Thomas, 51, and Tionne T-Boz Watkins, 52, made a rare TV appearance on Channel Nine’s Today show.
The girl group, who appear to have hardly aged a day in two decades, celebrated their 30-year anniversary.
You’ll NEVER guess what TLC looks like now! Chilli, 51, and T-Boz, 52, have hardly aged as they made a rare TV appearance ahead of a national RnB Live tour in Australia. pictured
‘To still be able to be here, selling out and doing tours and living life the way we are, it’s a blessing,’ T-Boz said.
Chilli also said she loves seeing younger generations singing their songs at concerts.
‘I absolutely love people singing our songs. It touches both of us in a way that is hard to explain to see little ones who weren’t born singing our songs,’ she said.
The girl group, who appear to have hardly aged a day in two decades, celebrated their 30-year anniversary during an appearance on Channel Nine’s Today show
TLC will be performing at the Australian RnB Fridayz Live tour in November.
Thrift Shop hitmaker Macklemore, who performed at the 2017 NRL Grand Final in Sydney, is headlining the event and will perform alongside a bevy of other stars.
The huge line-up also includes international superstars like Ashanti and Shaggy and Australia’s own DJ Havana Brown.
TLC were best known as a trio, however third member Lisa ‘Left Eye’ Lopes tragically died aged 30 in a road collision in 2002
American hip hop trio TLC were formed in Atlanta in 1991, and went on to have a string of hits including Waterfalls, No Scrubs and Unpretty.
TLC were best known as a trio, however third member Lisa ‘Left Eye’ Lopes tragically died aged 30 in a road collision in 2002.
In 2020 – almost 18 years after the loss of the rapper – TLC singer Chilli told how there was ‘never ever a thought’ to replace the late star in the group.
Speaking on GMB, she said: ‘We heard from so many people, in the business, that surprised us more than anything. The fans, not so much.
It was never ever a thought to replace her, no one in TLC can be replaced. Nobody can fill those shoes.’
She went on to explain that while she and T-Boz were adament that there would be no new members, it took some time for others to see their point of view.
Chilli added: ‘It took a while for people to get it. But through touring it keeps her memory of her alive, we never mute out her raps of her or anything.’
TLC will be performing at the Australian RnB Fridayz Live tour in November. Thrift Shop hitmaker Macklemore (pictured) is headlining the event and will perform alongside a bevy of other stars
Somewhere between the carpaccio of kingfish and the squid-ink spaghetti, Emma Thompson tucks into the female orgasm.
“Women have to perform orgasms all the time,” she says. “Maybe you don’t want to make loud noises and thrash about like a f—ing electric eel.”
Her mother, and mine and yours, might have advised against discussing such matters at the dining table, but that’s just because “we’re ashamed of it, we’re deeply disrespectful about sex”, she insists.
“Here we are having a meal, and we’ll talk about the food until the kingdom come, but we don’t talk about sex, or at least we don’t talk about pleasure. And I feel it’s a big mistake to cut it so entirely out of our life. I think it leads to a great deal of unhappiness, mental illness, and indeed is part of the problem of violence.”
Thompson first came to Australia in the early 1980s with the Cambridge Footlights comedy revue, and her husband briefly went to school in Sydney, but this is her first visit to Melbourne. “I love it here,” she says.Credit:Justin McManus
Forthright as she is, I suspect not every meal with Dame Emma Thompson, the first and, so far, the only person to win Oscars for both acting and writing, gets so fleshy so fast. And much as I might like to think it owes something to my, ahem, stimulating company, in truth it’s been the topic du jour for the past week and a half, as she has toured the country, done endless media interviews and answered a vast range of questions at Q&A screenings to support her new film Good Luck to You, Leo Grande.
Thompson doesn’t need to traipse across the world to spruk an English indie comedy-drama, no matter how charming it is. She’s here because she thinks its Australian director, Sophie Hyde (52 Tuesdays, AnimalsSBSseries The Hunting), is an “extraordinary” talent who handled the intimate and very challenging material with great finesse.
“This film could have been so many different things, but I think the reason it’s doing what it’s doing is because of Sophie. She’s just so delicate.”
Thompson plays Nancy in Big Leoa widowed former teacher of religious education who hires a male escort to help tackle a long-standing regret: she’s never had an orgasm.
In fact, it’s just one of the many sex-related things she didn’t experience in her otherwise happy-enough marriage. But with the help of Leo (young Irish actor Daryl McCormack), she sets about tackling the list with a good deal of “will this be on the exam Miss” gusto. Tick it off, move along.
Gnocchi with ragu of pork neck, fennel seeds and leek.Credit:Justin McManus
What she’s really been missing, though, is a sense of ease in her own skin, and that’s where Hyde and screenwriter Katy Brand’s body- and sex-positive arc is leading her, literally. The film ends with the 63-year-old Thompson fully naked, appraising her own body de ella with a hard-won sense of acceptance and, yes, pleasure.
“I felt like I knew exactly who she was,” says Thompson of Nancy. “I think she’s everywhere. She’s in every woman. ”
Is she even in you?
“Nope. I couldn’t do it if it was me. Nancy is so different to me.”
The exciting thing about acting, she says, “is playing someone who’s not like you at all. Sometimes there’s a little bit of cross-hatching, a little bit of a palimpsest, but generally the thrill is to get as far away from yourself as possible.”
Nancy is a pleaser, she says. The real Emma Thompson has more in common with the talk show host she played in the 2019 comedy late night, written by Mindy Kaling. “Independent, interested, a bit irritable, did n’t suffer fools, she said what she meant.”
Thompson with her Leo Grande co-star Daryl McCormack in Sydney last week.Credit:Oscar Coleman
I was told by her publicist that Thompson is exactly as you’d expect, and it’s true. She’s warm, smart, fierce, funny. The discreet-but-unmissable glances from other diners reinforce the fact she’s also a bit of a legend, but her down-to-earth manner de ella, and her earthy sense of humor de ella, make it easy to forget that.
Our lunch date is Thompson’s last interview of an eight-day Australian tour, with just the evening’s screening to follow, and she’s ready to unwind. “I wish I didn’t have to work tonight,” she says as the first sip of a very easy-to-drink drink slides down. “I’d be here for hours.”
Even so, there’s a brief moment when I fear I’ve made a terrible mistake in booking Caterina’s for lunch. It’s not that this gorgeous cellar restaurant in the heart of Melbourne’s legal district isn’t classy enough. It’s just that it specializes in Venetian cuisine – and Thompson and her actor husband Greg Wise have an apartment in Venice, so I fear I’ve accidentally invited her on a busman’s holiday.
But the second she takes her first bite of the baccala – a creamy codfish spread atop a perfectly toasted oval of bread – any chance of that evaporates. “Oh my God, that’s so good,” she says, her whole face squinting in delight. “They’ve got that so right. That’s made me very happy.”
Kingfish Carpaccio with cream, blood orange, citrus oil and radish.Credit:Justin McManus
Thompson doesn’t like fussiness, but she does love food. My entree of gnocchi with a white ragu of pork neck, fennel and leek has her reaching over for a forkful, then later another spoonful, and as our host weaves her hospo magic over us, it’s clear there are two stars in the room. “She’s amazing, Caterina. She she’s super cool, ”Thompson observes. “Ella She’s someone who can really do this, who knows food and knows how to inhabit it but also make it feel light-hearted.”
Thompson’s daughter Gaia is 22 and studying drama, but she’s also a very good cook. “And I keep saying, ‘I know you like acting, but, you know, perhaps running a restaurant can be as exciting’. There’s something very theatrical about restaurants; when you get it right, you feel so happy and lucky to be in it.”
billCredit:Karl Quinn
For sure. But there’s something theatrical about … well, the theater and film and television too, right?
“Yeah, you’re absolutely right. I love my job so much, I’m so lucky to keep being given opportunities to do it. And I’m just about to go back and do theater.”
She’s been working on the stage musical adaptation of her 2005 film Nanny McPhee for about five years now, and can finally see what looks like the finishing line. “I think it’s about 18 months away,” she says. “I’ve done many, many drafts. The composer, Gary Clark, has written many, many songs.”
She gave him just two musical reference points: English cabaret rock band The Tiger Lillies and Tom Waits’ album SwordfishTrombones. “A sort of steampunk Victoriana, that’s what we’re going for,” she says. “Something really muscular and dark and a little bit sinister in that way that makes children very happy.”
Thompson has been developing Nanny McPhee for the stage for about five years, and hopes it will be ready in another 18 months.
With acting credits in more than 90 films and series and writing credits on seven movies – including the Oscar-winning Sense and Sensitivity, Nanny McPhee and its sequel, Bridget Jones’s Baby and Last Christmas – I wonder what it is that makes her most happy, career-wise.
“Acting is more fun,” she says. “You get energy from other people, whereas [with] writing you’re on your own. But I would say my favorites are the ones I’ve written. Because if you’ve started with a blank piece of paper and you’ve ended up in the Curzon [an English cinema chain] it’s just such a journey.
“You can’t really fathom it, but the satisfaction, the sense of purpose for starters, and then disbelief when it actually happens, is so enormous that the pleasure is out of all proportion to any other experience.”
Better than sex even?
“Different,” she says. “It lasts longer. I’m sure there’s other very good gags to be had out of this analogy, but right now I’m pissed, so I’m struggling to think of them.”
As much as it’s the sex, and her nudity, that have grabbed the headlines, Big Leo isn’t just about that. “It’s mostly words,” she says. “The really confronting thing was doing 12 to 15 pages of dialogue a day, so getting your kit off and standing in front of a mirror is quite easy after that.”
The nude scene was filmed at the end of the rapid-fire 19-day shoot, and she concedes it was quite confronting, “because I had made a very conscious decision to use my own body as it is, rather than preparing it in any way to make it fit an expectation that people might have”.
That fits both with the theme of the movie and with her take on the beauty myth, which she sees, per Naomi Wolf, as an oppressive tool that emerged in response to women’s emancipation. “As soon as women got the vote and started to earn money, everyone told them they should be smaller, thinner, take up less space,” she says. “Why not spend all your time and energy thinking about what’s wrong with your body, and spending money on ways to alter it?”
Big Leo won’t upend that construct on its own, but it might help a few people think differently about their bodies, about sex, and indeed about sex work. It might open up a space in which some people might be able to acknowledge that being a parent isn’t always the greatest gift, that fear is such a stifling force, that marriage can be hard work but still worthwhile.
Nancy doesn’t much like her body at the start of her four meetings with sex worker Leo Grande, but by the end she is able to accept and even appreciate it in its full naked glory.
“I always think that phrase ‘failed marriage’ is so cruel,” says Thompson, whose first to Kenneth Branagh lasted six years but whose second, to Greg Wise, is 27 years and counting. “We seem to think of it as some kind of achievable state, which is a bit unfair. Relationships have their time, don’t they, and then they come to an end.”
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So, too, do lunches, and after submitting cheerily to a few selfies she’s off for a post-prandial nap before the evening’s screening. After a couple of days to herself, she it’ll be back to England and whatever comes next.
Goodbye and good luck to you, Emma Thompson. It’s been a pleasure – not faking.
Good Luck to You, Leo Grande is in cinemas since August 18.
Email the author at [email protected], or follow him on Facebook at karlquinnjournalist and on Twitter @karlkwin.
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Marilyn Manson has been spotted during a rare outing in Hollywood with his much younger wife.
The 53-year-old heavy metal singer, whose real name is Brian Warner, stepped out with his long-term partner Lindsay Usich, 37, for dinner in the Californian city.
It’s understood the pair began dating in 2012, before tying the knot in 2020.
Manson, who is reportedly two years sober, cut a vastly different figure for the couple’s date night, where he was photographed sans his signature gothic make-up.
He wore an all-black casual outfit, while Usich wore an emerald green dress with a black jacket.
Manson has rarely been spotted publicly amid multiple sexual abuse allegations leveled against him over the past year, all of which he has denied.
It comes after Manson’s damning texts to Johnny Depp were exposed in documents seen by Daily Beast, which contained pages of evidence excluded from Depp’s trial against ex-wife Amber Heard.
In a 2016 text, Manson allegedly wrote of his wife, “I got an amber 2.0” and also “Lindsay just puled an amber on me… please delete.”
Depp responds, “I been reading A LOT of material on that and sociopathic behavior… it is f***ing real my brother!! My ex-c**t is goddamn TEXTBOOK!!!” according to the document.
Then Manson, in an apparent reference to an incident where the police were called to Depp and Heard’s shared Los Angeles apartment in 2016, wrote, “I got a serious police amber type scenarios with L’s family.
“I’m f***ing stressed. I don’t know if you are back but I need asylum somewhere because I think the cops might be headed my way,” the filing states.
Manson’s former partner, US actress Evan Rachel Wood, has led claims against the goth rocker, including that he forced her to have sex with him while filming one of his music videos.
Wood named Manson as her alleged abuser for the first time in February 2021. They began dating in 2006, when she was 18 and he was 37.
The couple dated for four years, with Wood bringing to light allegations of sexual and emotional abuse years later, though it was only recently that she named Manson as her alleged abuser.
“He started grooming me when I was a teenager and horrifically abused me for years,” Wood wrote on Instagram in February last year.
“I was brainwashed and manipulated into submission. I am done living in fear of retaliation, slander or blackmail.
“I am here to expose this dangerous man and call out the many industries that have enabled him, before he ruins any more lives.
“I stand with the many victims who will no longer be silent.”
Jasmine Stefanovic has honored husband Karl Stefanovic’s 48th birthday with a clip of the fun-loving Today co-host letting off steam in Europe, vape in hand.
In the clip shared on Instagram, Stefanovic is seen being whipped in the face with air from a special effects gun until his cap falls off, arms spread wide as others laugh around him.
“Happy Birthday to the light of all our lives. We adore you and your soft beautiful soul,” 38-year-old shoe designer Jasmine captioned the post, which is set to Fisher’s party track lose it.
“You keep us laughing everyday. Thank you for brightening our world.”
The footage is from the couple’s current travels in Europe, set in a glamorous venue complete with several Louis Roederer Cristal champagne ice buckets.
Not quite matching the aesthetic, Karl is seen clutching a green vape in the video, which followers were quick to point out.
“It’s the apple flavored vape for me,” one wrote.
The Channel 9 star’s mum weighed-in that the post “says it all” about her cheeky son — whose most infamous antics include showing up still-drunk after the Logies in 2009.
“Great picture. “says it all.” Karl loves life. Every day since a baby he has woken up with a smile and that has never stopped. Happy birthday darling. Thank you for been (sic) you. Love you mum,” Jenny Stefanovic wrote.
Industry colleagues chimed in to offer their well wishes, too, with Channel 9’s Belinda Russell commenting: “Happy birthday King Karlos!!”
“Happy Birthday King. Love ya bro,” Ryan “Fitzy” Fitzgerald added.
Last week, the Stefanovic clan, including two-year-old daughter Harper, were seen living it up on billionaire James Packer’s $283 million superyacht in the French Riviera.
Former Australian cricket captain Michael Clarke, 41, also joined in on the fun, and was spotted with his rumored girlfriend, Jasmine’s younger sister Jade Yarbrough, 30.
Stefanovic is currently enjoying some time off-air, with co-host Allison Langdon being joined on the Channel 9 breakfast show by Nine reporter Charles Croucher.
Billionaire Rupert Murdoch and model Jerry Hall have finalized their divorce after six years of marriage, Hall’s lawyer says.
Key points:
Murdoch is worth more than $US17 billion ($24 billion), according to Forbes
The couple reportedly signed a prenuptial agreement
It means the separation is unlikely to alter the ownership structure of businesses Murdoch holds stakes in
It was the fourth divorce for 91-year-old Murdoch, who married Hall, 66, in London in March 2016.
“Jerry and Rupert Murdoch have finalized their divorce,” lawyer Judy Poller said.
“They remain good friends and wish each other the best for the future.”
Australian-born Murdoch owns newspapers around the world and is worth more than $US17 billion ($24 billion), according to Forbes.
The couple signed a prenuptial agreement, The New York Times reported in June. It means the separation is unlikely to alter the ownership structure of businesses in which Murdoch holds stakes.
Those businesses include the parent companies of Fox News and The Wall Street Journal.
Murdoch’s powerful global media empire also includes the New York Post, The Times of London and British tabloid The Sun.
Murdoch’s first wife was Patricia Booker, an Australian flight attendant he divorced in the late 1960s.
He and his second wife, Anna, a newspaper reporter, were together more than 30 years before divorcing in 1999.
His third marriage to Wendi Deng ended in 2013 amid media reports that she was romantically involved with Britain’s former prime minister Tony Blair, who has denied any impropriety.
Hall, who was born in Texas, in the United States, was the longtime partner of Rolling Stones lead singer Mick Jagger, with whom she has four children.
Standing in front of her bedroom mirror, smoking, selecting a lipstick and choosing a hair accessory, Nancy (Genevieve Lemon) is preparing to go out. But when a car pulls up and hastily deposits a young girl at her doorstep, she has to adjust her plans for her. Nancy has forgotten to cancel her child-minding arrangement. She still heads out, but now she has young Amirah (Mia-Lore Bayeh) in tow. A Lebanese migrant who speaks no English, Amirah, carrying her pet spider in a jar, is a watchful observer who keeps her thoughts from her to herself, although they’re revealed to viewers via subtitles.
Written by Nisrine Amine and directed by Lucy Gaffy, We the Spiders is the first of the eight loosely connected stories that make up Here Out Westa carefully curated portmanteau film that has been deftly scripted by eight writers (Amine, Arka Das, Bina Bhattacharya, Matias Bolla, Claire Cao, Dee Dogan, Vonne Patiag and Tien Tran) and fluidly directed by Gaffy, Ana Kokkinos, Leah Purcell, Fadia Abboud and Julie Kalceff.
Leah Vandenberg in the Eternal Dance, one of the standout stories in the portmanteau production Here Out West.Credit:John Platt
Nancy’s destination, the local hospital in Sydney’s inner west where her daughter has just given birth, becomes a key location where many of its racially diverse characters cross paths. And an impulsive action by the new grandmother becomes the springboard for the events that follow.
Nothing goes smoothly for the characters in Here Out West. Everyone’s plans are disrupted and they have to find ways to adapt. Flowering into a vibrant mosaic, the beautifully assembled telemovie is made up of stories about people under pressure and it smoothly draws together a wide cross-section of migrant communities. What’s more, it does so without waving a self-congratulatory flag for its representation of diversity. This, it is perceptively showing but not blatantly declaring, is the melting pot that is Sydney’s west.
There are parents who’ve been separated from their children or are fighting with them. There are children struggling with or rebelling against expectations. There are migrants endeavoring to honor the traditions of their homelands while battling to adapt to the realities of a more recently adopted country: trying to find work, to meet the demands of employers, to keep their businesses afloat, to cope with health issues.
Arka Das, Rahel Romahn, Thuso Lekwape in Here Out West, a beautifully assembled telemovie set in Sydney’s migrant communities. Credit:ABC
All manner of compromises are seen to be required in order for them to get by. There’s stress and strain everywhere and, in such an environment, small gestures of kindness assume great significance. Events unfold in unpredictable ways and nothing is overstated. The drama is poignant without ever sliding into sentimentality.
Two of the standout stories – and there are no doubts – are The Eternal Dance and The Musicians. The first, written by Bhattacharya and directed by Kokkinos, finds Ashmita (Leah Vandenberg) hurrying to visit her father in hospital, her mother sitting nervously at his bedside. She rushes in looking worried, carrying her favorite sweets from her, and promptly snaps at a terse, over-worked nurse (Anita Hegh).
Fitness star Steph Claire Smith, 28, shares the month-long ‘sex challenge’ she’s trying with her husband – and the strict rules they’re sticking to
Fitness star Steph Claire Smith revealed she’s taken on a 30-day sex challenge
She and her husband have to be intimate daily for a month straight
The 28-year-old said the pair have defined intimacy as anything ‘beyond kissing’
She said some days sex can be a ‘full-on task’ and she ‘can’t be bothered’
But admitted increased intimacy has bought the couple closer together
By Louise Allingham For Daily Mail Australia
Published: | Updated:
Fitness entrepreneur Steph Claire Smith has revealed she and her husband are completing a 30-day sex challenge where they must be intimate with each other every day for a month.
On her KICPOD podcast, the mum-of-one confessed to co-host Laura Henshaw that she was on day 13 of the challenge with her husband, Josh Miller, and listed the rules they’ve set.
Steph said she and Josh have to be intimate with each other beyond kissing every day and while it’s been ‘really hard’ and there are times she ‘just can’t be bothered’, the test has brought the pair closer together.
Fitness entrepreneur Steph Claire Smith has revealed she and her husband are completing a 30-day sex challenge where they must be intimate with each other every day for a month
The mum-of-one told her podcast co-host Laura Henshaw she and Josh (right) were on day 13 of the challenge and have to be intimate with each other beyond kissing every day
‘The way we’ve defined it is further than kissing but doesn’t necessarily have to be all the way to sex, if you can read between the lines,’ she explained and added they decided to take on the challenge after Josh saw it on-line.
Laura was audibly shocked by the saucy news and asked Steph if she was tired.
The 28-year-old admitted daily sex can sometimes feel like a ‘full-on task’ and the couple, who have a one-year-old Harvey, find it difficult to keep up the challenge if they’ve had an argument.
‘There have been days where we have had an argument and then it’s like ‘oh now we have to have sex as well’,’ she said.
‘But in the back of our minds, we really want to do this for each other so you just work through it and it happens and then you’re in a really good mood before you go to bed.’
Steph (pictured with her son Harvey, one) said while it’s been ‘really hard’ and there are times she ‘just can’t be bothered’, the challenge has brought the pair closer together
The 28-year-old admitted daily sex can sometimes feel like a ‘full-on task’ and the couple find it difficult to keep up the challenge if they’ve had an argument
Steph said some days are easier than others and she sometimes ‘just can’t be bothered’.
‘There are some days, as there are without a challenge, where you genuinely really feel up to it naturally without it being a task so there have been times where it’s felt easier and it has felt like more of a habit but it’s still hard, ‘she said.
She said her and Josh are typically intimate at the end of the day but they’re ‘trying to fix that’ and the challenge has had its benefits on their relationship.
‘When we are close and intimate like that everything is better we get along better, we’re more cuddly throughout the day and we’re nicer to each other,’ she said.
‘I’m interested to see if it gets easier or it gets harder and what comes from the rest of the challenge.’
