Good Times Are a Prerogative for Bad Girls

Cameron Tuttle is making a career out of being bad. The 35-year-old San Francisco author is following up last year’s popular, pink vinyl-covered paperback “The Bad Girl’s Guide to the Open Road” (Chronicle Books, 1999) with a new book and a Web site--both offering tongue-in-cheek tips for women.

“The Bad Girl’s Guide to Getting What You Want” (Chronicle, 2000) is a collection of not wholly practical but nevertheless humorous tricks for scoring dates, money and parking spaces, and beautifying at the office. Tuttle’s insights include: “Dating yourself is quite possibly the most satisfying way to date,” “Traffic is the most under-utilized pickup scene in America” and “Who needs eye shadow when you’ve got copy toner?”

“Women need to be reminded not to take life so seriously,” Tuttle said Wednesday before a book signing at West Hollywood’s Book Soup. “So many women get stuck. This is a call to action. What do you secretly want to do that you don’t allow yourself to do?”

For Tuttle, it was road-tripping. After seeing the film “Thelma & Louise” in 1991, she wanted to quit her job at New York’s now-defunct In Fashion magazine, hit the road and never look back--except she didn’t own a car at the time.

Four years later, she did hit the road. Driving cross-country twice in one summer, she researched her irreverent road guide, which includes rules for “strip driver,” a takeoff on strip poker she learned from a truck driver in Missouri, whose motto is the “Show Me State.”

Although Tuttle isn’t keen on “cranking out” another bad-girl book too soon, she is fielding offers from Hollywood to adapt her adventures for the screen. In the meantime, she’s writing for her new Web site, https://www.badgirlswirl.com, and working on being bad. “If I was a hard-core bad girl,” she said, “I probably wouldn’t be sitting around writing about it.”

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Alicia Silverstone is being accused of being clueless when it comes to the English language. The British-based Plain English Campaign has awarded the actress its Foot in Mouth Award for a quote she provided to London’s Sunday Telegraph newspaper earlier this year. She said: “I think that [the film] ‘Clueless’ was very deep. I think it was deep in the way that it was very light. I think lightness has to come from a very deep place if it’s true lightness.”

The organization’s aim, according to spokesman John Lister, is to work toward getting all forms of public information, including forms, leaflets and contracts, into plain English--meaning that the intended audience can understand and act upon the information after a single reading.

The Plain English Campaign conducts training courses in Britain and offers editing services. The Foot in Mouth Award has been given out annually since 1980, Lister said, to the person guilty of making a “truly baffling verbal statement.”