Stirring It Up with Molly Ivins (28 page)

Final Fridays live on, with seasonal changes in destination. They now occur under the imprimatur of the
Texas Observer
as a tent welcoming all like-minded souls. There are a few ground rules: they no longer continue into the wee hours of the morning as they once did. The standing time frame is 7 p.m. to midnight. At one time everything said on those evenings was off the record, and to the best of my knowledge, few violated that constraint. With fewer reporters and more “civilians” participating these days, those rules have shifted.

Author, columnist, and populist Jim Hightower, who had known Molly since the late '70s, was a frequent face in the crowd. Molly and Jim were also veterans of several cruises organized by the
Nation
magazine. The publication hit on the idea to invite readers to go on a six-day sail with writers and political activists ranging from Barbara Ehrenreich and Tom Hayden to Arianna Huffington and Ralph Nader. The cruises included symposia and panel discussions held in the ship's amphitheater, where Las Vegas–style shows would otherwise have held sway. The
New York Times
dubbed the
Nation
cruises “The Love Boat for Policy Wonks.”

“Of course, at Final Friday food took a backseat to whatever else was going on,” Hightower said. “You weren't so much coming to dinner as you were participating in an evening of food and good conversation. I usually brought appetizers like baba ganoush and prosciutto-wrapped dates stuffed with Manchego cheese, stuff like that.”

Other contributions were more prosaic. I brought fried chicken, red beans and rice, and biscuits from Popeye's—calories and cholesterol be damned. When I didn't have money to splurge at Popeye's, I made a totally kick-ass tuna salad. In the summer someone always got ambitious and brought a huge platter of deviled eggs. In the winter one had to take care not to trip over cords leading from wall sockets to Crock-Pots full of chili, beef stew, or spaghetti.

Final Fridays at Molly's were eventually discontinued due to an overpopulation of curiosity seekers who behaved badly. Hangers-on who didn't know George Walker Bush from Luke Skywalker surfaced. As news spread of Molly's terminal cancer, attendees began to include the prurient curious.

Once, as Del Garcia and I stood talking near the front door, a couple broke away from their companions, another couple with whom they'd been talking. Neither Del nor I recognized any member of the quartet. As the woman moved toward Molly's bedroom door—Molly had quietly excused herself and gone to
bed as she increasingly did when her energy level flagged—I saw the woman turn back to the other couple and mouth the words, “Is she in there?” At this point I moved toward her and asked if she was looking for the bathroom and pointed her toward it. No, she replied, she wanted to know if Molly Ivins was behind that closed door. As calmly as possible I asked why she felt she needed to know that. At this point her husband nudged her and suggested they leave. There was no mistaking the extent to which I agreed with him.

It was 2005 and the beginning of the end in more ways than one. In its heyday Final Friday had been something to behold. Melancholy Ramblers. Hootenannies. Slam poets: Molly was on to this renegade art form ahead of a lot of others. Spike Gillespie was in the forefront.

Spike and Molly met not too long after Spike (her real name) moved to Austin in 1991. Spike took a job waiting tables at Magnolia Cafe South—“South” to distinguish its sister restaurant of the same name on the
good
side of town.

Located on South Congress near Molly's Travis Heights neighborhood, Magnolia South attracted, shall we say, an eclectic clientele—neighborhood regulars, cops, musicians, the hookers and homeless after a successful night of panhandling.

Spike, now a published “Arthur” (Molly's words), public speaker, quilter, wedding officiant, and president of the Office of Good Deeds, treasures those days.

“Molly would come in and we were always excited to see her,” she said. “But we wouldn't say anything because we were used to seeing visiting celebrities, and we wanted to respect her privacy. She thought she was traveling incognito, or as inconspicuously as a six-foot-tall strawberry blonde can, so we let her have it that way. One night she came in for dinner with her mother. Somehow in the course of the meal she knocked over a glass of iced tea. Everybody rushed to clean it up. I might have even made some lame joke along the lines of ‘Molly Ivins can't spill that, can she?'

“Anyway, we had this waiter named Lindsay from Australia, a UT journalism major, and he was beside himself to see her. Although I was covering her table, he couldn't wait to be the one to clear her plates. So when I checked on the table and saw they were gone, I said, ‘Hey, Molly, your plates are gone; did you put them in your purse or something?' It was really pretty funny because Molly had just been telling her mother that she liked to eat at the Magnolia because nobody knew who she was—and I had to tell her that
everybody
knew who she was. When she came in people were jockeying to wait on her. We were just too cool to let on.”

Molly liked Spike's spirit. As it transpired, Genevieve Van Cleve, a fellow poet, invited Spike to join her one Final Friday evening.

“I didn't want to come across as some big starfucker, so I said no,” Spike continued. “But then I found out what the evenings were really about and went the following month. In fact, before she got sick, I was one of the earliest people to take a kid. My son, Henry, was about eight or nine then and he loved to go. We'd bring his friends and they'd play in Molly's bedroom. He thought that was the coolest thing.”

'Round about that same time Spike was looking for someone to write a blurb for a new book of her poems. She mentioned this to Mike Smith, Molly's research assistant, and he urged her to ask Molly, which of course Spike couldn't bring herself to do. Instead she passed the manuscript on to Mike, figuring Molly would probably never bother.

A month or two later, Molly asked Spike to read a poem. She declined, arguing that she didn't have any new material—at which point Molly said, “Yes, you do.” With that she fetched the manuscript. Spike read and was a hit. Molly subsequently wrote the dust-jacket blurb.

Spike became part of a regiment of volunteers who chauffeured Molly to and from medical and hospital appointments. One of her early assignments occurred just after Molly's first round of surgery.

“After we left the hospital she invited me out to one of those ladies-who lunch places,” Spike said. “We had a lovely visit and a really good meal. When the check came I thoroughly intended to pay my share—but Molly insisted that I was her guest, and it was a good thing too, because I never had any money.

“As it turned out, though, Molly only had twenty dollars. Because she had just left the hospital, she didn't have any credit cards either. Between us we came up with enough loose change to pay the bill and put it all in that little black folder they leave on the table. So we're in this fancy joint and I'm with this millionaire ‘famous Arthur,' and there's change spilling out all over the place. Then this snooty waitress, her voice dripping with frigid sarcasm, sneering, ‘Do you need change?'”

Molly and Spike had become friends.

“I'll always be grateful for all the lunches she took me to,” Spike said. “Wherever we'd go, whether it was Eastside Cafe or Fonda San Miguel, the restaurant owners and staff all knew her. She was as gracious with the staff as she was with the owners. She was never too good for the so-called little people. I think
of her whenever I cook because I have potholders she gave me. [Liz Faulk, Molly's assistant at the time, started making them to pass the time when Molly was sick during chemo treatments.]

“Molly gave me some advice once, and I've always remembered it. She said, ‘If you're a hungry writer, save pennies so you can buy cat food, but drink water before going to bed; you can trick your stomach into believing it's full, but you can't sleep if the cat is yowling.'”

26

SO THERE WE WERE, MOLLY AND I
, driving along in Truck Bob, conjuring up a reason to have a celebratory dinner for someone. Anyone. Any reason.

Although she did indeed plan and organize real dinner parties with structure and properly paired wines, she and I would often stop halfway through preparing a meal and realize she had no idea who might eat it. Although it was not unusual to completely lose track of how many people might turn up as a result of our haphazard way of inviting guests, we had yet to plan a meal and not invite
anyone
.

Once we outsmarted ourselves by planning a birthday surprise dinner for Malcolm Greenstein. Not that there was anything particularly smart about what became a series of misbegotten episodes.

In any case, we couldn't top the birthday celebration and roast that friends threw for his sixtieth, where Molly was the moderator. By the time the program began, we were all pretty well oiled, including Molly. But she extolled his virtues, his generosity, his striking resemblance to a fit and trim Santa Claus, his commitment to social justice, and his rejection of worldly goods.