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I Miss You, Molly Ivins
The warm, funny, insightful political writer, and all-around truth teller, Molly Ivins, would have been 65 yesterday, the perfect age to wade into the national health care debate. Not that wading was her style. She was good at cutting through the crap.
Ivins was an unapologetic “lefty,” and famously coined the name, “Shrub,” for George W. Bush, whom she first met while they were in high school. She was a towering presence, figuratively and literally, at 6 feet tall, born in California, raised in Texas, and educated in elite schools in the Northeast. She had a brief tenure at the New York Times, but it was not a happy marriage. She was stifled at the paper, and it drove her crazy. She returned to Texas to write, and made the legislature (or Lege, as she called it) one of her favorite targets.
Molly Ivins described herself as a “left-wing aging Bohemian journalist, who never made a shrewd career move, never dressed for success, never got married, and isn’t even a lesbian, which at least would be interesting.”
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I love her self-description. Subtract the journalist part and I could say the same about myself, although there’s no way that I’m anywhere NEAR as cool. 😉
Someone else from Texas whom I miss is Ann Richards.
“left-wing aging Bohemian journalist, who never made a shrewd career move, never dressed for success, never got married, and isn’t even a lesbian, which at least would be interesting.” Fabulous, and what a loss at only 65 – only ten years older than me -yikes! I agree, take out the journalist part, I could be her – well, except I have been married because I wasn’t smart enough to realize I wasn’t cut out for it. Anyway, what a wonderful spirit and a shame she’s gone so soon.