Remembering Molly

The word’s quickly spreading of Molly Ivins’s death today from recurrent breast cancer, at 62.  That’s a damned sight too young for someone whom I remember as a vital, lively person, telling stories and pitching off casual observations in her smoker’s-rasp voice, intermixed with a deep laugh that seemed to come all the way up from her feet.

Molly used to be one of my customers at Congress Avenue Booksellers, back when I was a lot younger and she was still a Minor Regional Columnist for the Dallas Times Herald.  We got to like each other, and one day I asked her if she’d come be the guest speaker one month for the Austin chapter of Mensa (I was a member then).  She said yeah, she’d be happy to, call her and we’d work it out.  So one day I called.

In the months between the time she said yes and the time I called her, she published her first book, hit the New York Times bestseller list, and became a hot property charging a fancy fee for her speaking dates.  Nonetheless she held up her end of the bargain, came to our monthly dinner meeting, annoyed several of our more tight-assed members by smoking at table (hell, we were in the smoking section of the restaurant), and gave a good, funny speech for no more fee than us paying for her CFS and Coronas.  That was the best attended meeting Lonestar Mensa ever had; more than 90 people came to hear her that night.  (All those extra people can’t have hurt the restaurant’s receipts, either.)

I still have her business card from those days in my business-card wallet; in royal blue letters on a pale blue ground it said

MOLLY IVINS
COLUMNIST
DALLAS TIMES HERALD

with her address (1606-B Waterloo, 78704—she always was a South Austin kinda gal) and her home phone number.  That was all.  No graphics, no fancy tarting up.  Just plain and straightforward—like she was herself.

Wherever you’re gone, dear, give ’em hell.  They probably need it.

She can’t SAY that, can she??  Fnord.