Media Platforms Design Team
The woman in these photos, this is not the Sarah Shahi I'm looking at. It's not that she isn't beautiful; it's just that she is more approachably cute than intimidatingly hot: five foot three, freckled, no makeup, hair back, bouncy energy, bawdy, funny, kicking my shoes and punching my knees for emphasis. Point is: I can deal.
Media Platforms Design Team
She's approachable enough that I have the guts to suggest, five minutes into our hike, that she deface public property by adding her name, in pen, to the list of donors on the giant sign at the entrance to the park. Luckily it's 99 degrees out, so no one is around to catch her, though they will later when it's cooled down. You'd think costarring in the NBC cop show Life would clue you in to stuff like that. Luckily it's also far too hot to hike, so Shahi suggests we have a picnic instead. As we get into her Volvo wagon, the inside of its left front door completely chewed up by her dog, Eddie, she reaches into the cupholder and pulls out a half-empty oversized can of Tecate she gave to her fiancé when she picked him up at the airport. "I didn't know driving with this was illegal until he told me," she says. "Maybe I should go throw it out."
Media Platforms Design Team
We stop at a supermarket for picnic stuff, and Shahi seems a little too enthused. "When I first moved to L.A., every time I saw a grocery store, I had to go in. I love the shiny floors, all the colors of all the vegetables. The grocery store is a promise -- that one day I'll be able to cook." I tell Shahi that I can teach her to cook, which becomes our new new plan for the day, until we start talking about how she has been looking for a house, and we decide to go house hunting instead. Shahi, twenty-eight, is pretty much Holden Caulfield's dream woman: no phoniness, all digression.
Media Platforms Design Team
As we drive up to a house that looks promising, Shahi shoots it down: "Not private enough. Too many lookie-loos. Plus, I don't know about these stairs. What if I get a handicapped friend? I don't have one now, but what if I get one?" She wants something very Americana so she can start a family, to have the experience she never had. Her dad, a great-grandson of a shah, escaped with his Spanish-born wife to Dallas from Iran when the revolution broke out in 1979. "He was not a good father. You know all those drugs Heath Ledger was on? He did all of those," she says. "He left my mother the day she gave birth to my sister. I haven't talked to him in three years." I am not proud to admit it, but when I hear about her daddy issues, I find this Shahi almost as hot as the woman in the photos.
Media Platforms Design Team
She's really close with her mom, who -- even for child-beauty-pageant-obsessed Texas (yes, she entered Shahi in those, too) -- seemed to have unorthodox child-rearing principles. "When I was in seventh grade, I was already a C cup," Shahi says. (By tenth grade, by the way, she was a double D, though she's in much better shape now and back to a C. My journalistic skills were particularly sharp during this part of the interview.) When Shahi was in junior high, her mom, insisting she take pride in her body, would make her wear half shirts. "She wouldn't even buy me a bra, because she thought it would hinder my growth. I was like walking blue balls, because I had to dress sexy, but I couldn't date." This is how you wind up as a Dallas Cowboys cheerleader during your first year at SMU.
Media Platforms Design Team
During her stint as a cheerleader, Robert Altman came to the workout facility because one of the characters in his film Dr. T and the Women was on the Cowboys squad. The cheerleaders were told not to fraternize with the Hollywood visitors, but Shahi is not one to listen to authority, especially when it means not socializing. Altman, who Shahi insists was not a dirty old man despite the following evidence, had a bunch of lunches with her and told her to move to L.A. So she quit the team, dropped out of her freshman year of college, moved west, and started working right away, landing a guest spot as Tony Soprano's peyote-procuring Vegas-stripper fling in The Sopranos and a role on Showtime's The L Word, from which she gained, for the first time, female fans. "The thing about lesbian fans is they're much more aggressive. I have been groped and grabbed by lesbians," she says. When I tell her she is on both my lesbian friend's list of five celebrities she's allowed to sleep with and her girlfriend's list, too, Shahi looks unsurprised. "Maybe I should send them flowers," she says. "Or lube."
Media Platforms Design Team
Shahi is bored of looking at the outsides of houses. We drive to a Whole Foods so she can buy salmon for that cooking lesson. As we're leaving, she runs into Gil Junger, a director who worked on the short-lived 2006 sitcom Teachers, on which she costarred. Junger spends most of the conversation telling Shahi, in a surprising variety of ways, how hot she is. "You walked out of that room -- and there are a million pretty women in this town -- but your natural beauty just blew us away. She did Krav Maga. If she didn't fuck us, she'd kill us. Which turned us on." I have never before been embarrassed for another person's hotness. Gil Junger accomplished what Naomi Wolf could not.
Media Platforms Design Team
When we enter her rental house in the Valley, it's full of pictures of scary-hot Sarah Shahi, including a particularly memorable triptych of her as a Dallas Cowboys cheerleader, as well as contemporary art that her fiancé, actor Steve Howey from the sitcom Reba, collects. He's in the living room, focused on a game of Grand Theft Auto IV until he hears about the upcoming cooking lesson, which gets him very excited. It seems Shahi's previous attempts have not gone well: a sandwich had wax paper still attached to the cheese; a frozen pizza had shreds of aluminum foil fused onto the burned crust. They seem like a really sweet couple, even though their second date involved him spitting in her beer because he thought she was drinking too much, to which she responded by spitting in his face. Seriously, stare at those photos all you want, but you're glad you're not dating an actress.
Media Platforms Design Team
As we cook a mustard-crusted salmon and she demonstrates knife skills that are so bad, they're dangerous, Shahi explains that she just quit her Nicorette habit, which is strange, since she's never smoked. She just wanted to fit in with the cast of Life when they took smoking breaks. I've never smoked, either, and she makes me chew her last piece of nicotine gum. I get a crazy head rush and have to sit down. That's when she warns me. That I might have immediate, uncontrollable stomach issues. This panics me. But she walks up to me and whispers slowly, in the voice of the woman in the photos, "It's good. Who doesn't like taking a big dump? I do." The answer is me, here.
So I accept the gift of tangerines she picked from her tree and get the hell out of there, head buzzing and haunted by the cheerleader triptych. The next day she sends me an e-mail -- she has, unsurprisingly, a crude e-mail address -- saying that her boyfriend loved the meal. I was honestly, oddly, unjealously happy for him. Even the Shahi who isn't in these photos would be too much for me to handle.
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7pr%2FQrqCrnV6YvK57xKernqqklravucSnq2ihnqmys8LInq6sZ5FphXeCjqyYq5mYYsCprceiZKmhk6h6cYWPcWY%3D