Stirring It Up with Molly Ivins (3 page)

So far, not bad.

It was my first internally uttered “thank you” to Miz Ivins. I had met two of her friends and found common ground. More introductions were to come. If it hadn't been for Molly, who knows if I'd have met the Albachs, who introduced me to Betsy Julian and Ed Cloutman, a husband-wife tag team of extraordinary legal talent—having been the minds behind almost all of Dallas's significant voting rights, housing, and school desegregation cases starting in the 1970s and continuing through the 1980s and well into the 1990s. It's worth noting that their son, Edward IV, a graduate of Baylor University Law School, is following in their footsteps with a plaintiff's litigation practice, including civil rights. Such are the people Molly called “friends.”

With those initial introductions, more followed. Through the Cloutmans I met Linda and Steve Anderson, who could always be counted on to have fine food and fabulous gatherings at their Dallas home. In addition to being an attorney, Steve was an excellent cook and Linda was an exuberant hostess. Steve and Linda have since gone their separate ways, but Molly spoke often and fondly of Steve's paella and Linda's hospitality. Steve's sister, Austin artist Courtney Anderson, became a confidante and one of Molly's closest friends.

When Molly and I weren't railing against some aspect of social injustice, we talked about food, from farming and ranching to organics and free trade to the joys of foie gras, vichyssoise, and red beans and rice, prompting a detour to discussing foods that provoke flatulent responses from the average digestive
system and thereby providing irrefutable proof that Molly was as capable of lowbrow conversation as the next ten-year-old. She could hold forth on almost anything, and it seemed that the more obtuse the subject matter, the more she relished it, although there was nothing obtuse about her love of pork—be it ribs, chops, roast, or tenderloin.

We talked about food as memory, authoritatively and with no scientific data whatsoever, placing the blame for family breakdowns squarely on the fact that so few families sit down and eat together anymore. We shared remembrances of little details, like when we learned how to set the table, how brothers and sisters took turns screwing up the placement of knife on the right and fork on the left, and how nobody ever wanted to load or empty the dishwasher despite the fact that it relieved us of having to wash dishes by hand.

She called me a liar when I told her about
The White Trash Cookbook
and how I owned both volumes and had actually found a recipe for an onion sandwich that I made and loved. My father loved them too: thin-sliced Bermuda onion, Miracle Whip (
not
mayonnaise), and lots of black pepper between two slices of Wonder Bread constitute heaven on a plate. You could gussy it up with a slice or two of tomato, but the basics worked just fine, thank you very much. For some reason this prompted a segue into why Americans ate so much bad food. In the mid-1990s she saw food issues as a neglected component of a serious social narrative. By then I had moved from editing to reporting to being a food writer. I began to focus more on food beyond its value as joy and sustenance, trends and recipes. I thought more about how corporate marketing foisted food-like substances on us, how we fell for it, and how the more we fell for it and the more sedentary we were, the fatter and sicker we got. If you wanted to elicit one of those wonderful Molly sneers, all you had to do was mention Archer Daniels Midland, Cargill, or Monsanto—especially insanely litigious Monsanto.

How I wished she could have lived to meet Robyn O'Brien, the feisty writer, born in Texas but living in Colorado. She wrote a remarkable book called
Unhealthy Truths
, about how additives and chemicals and hormones in livestock have combined to promulgate allergies and mysterious ailments in children. Like Molly, she came from well-heeled Houston social stock; like Molly, she could rattle off the ironic ways in which corporate agriculture is not necessarily food-friendly and how Frankenfoods are making us fat and sick.

Molly, who stood an inch or so over six feet, fought an often losing battle with her weight. I had long since abandoned my struggle, along with the amphetamines that were supposed to curb my appetite but made me crazy instead. On food-filled Austin weekends we pretty much settled for just eating good stuff—food free of pesticides, additives, preservatives, artificial colors, nitrates, and nitrites. Well, except for red velvet cake, bacon, and smoked sausage. Hebrew National made the hot dog cut.

Once Molly's health became fragile she paid even more attention to what we ate, almost always buying organic or at least preservative-, hormone-, and additive-free foods. (To enhance the value of appreciating this newfound commitment, you might want to read at least a couple of chapters of
Bushwhacked
, the book Molly and Lou Dubose published in 2001 (he and Molly coauthored three books altogether). Revisit how Bush dismantled proposed Clinton-era safeguards that would have expanded food inspection and tightened USDA regulations. Pay particular attention to the word
listeria
, and hope this particular food-borne bacterial infection never gets close to you or anyone you care about.

Mercifully, First Lady Michelle Obama has taken up the healthy-food sword and has led a national charge into battle against bad food, moving many communities to take a long, hard look at what they feed themselves.

By the time Molly's health took its worst turn, neither she nor I was counting calories. Instead of trying to lose weight, it was important for her to gain as that hateful duo of cancer and chemo took its toll. We took great pride, however, in knowing that almost every pound we carried was free of high-fructose corn syrup, monosodium glutamate, red dye #5, and yellow dye #3. In truth, most of the time we spent a lot more time eating than we did intellectualizing and deconstructing food's sociopolitical underpinnings. Relentless examination of American food flaws can really wear you out. Eating is much more fun. Better to just get on with it.

It never occurred to either of us that we wouldn't have all the time in the world to get on with it, including a mountain of silly conversations.

2

ALTHOUGH SECURE IN HER INTELLECTUAL ABILITIES
, Molly was in fact quite shy—an aspect of her persona that few knew. With close friends she was able to privately be goofy to the point of convulsive laughter over the kind of stuff that, when conveyed to others, elicits a pained, stone-faced response as listeners seek to divine a kernel of anything approximating hilarity.

Some of us have experienced such a visage: midway through relating what seemed like a rip-roaringly funny event at the time, we see a perplexed look envelop the listener's face, a look that suggests it's best to wind down immediately. With a feeble, “Well, you had to have been there,” your voice trails off in the hope that someone will pick up the conversational non-thread. We shared those too. For the longest time, Molly's favorite “Ellen is a doo-doo brain” story dated to the time she invited me to a Texas Book Festival gala, held the night before the festival's official opening. It was an impressive gathering of prominent writers and authors. I loved going to those things despite feeling like a fish out of water.

“Um, I'm a food writer,” sounds so feeble when you're making small talk with the likes of, say, James K. Galbraith. So when I realized I had been pontificating about the glories of how bacon, sausage, and salt pork complemented various dried beans in a way smoked turkey never could, it was too late. I had no idea I was rattling on to a noted economist who was also the son of John Kenneth Galbraith—one of the twentieth century's foremost economists. I'm sure he was enthralled by my monologue about culinary relativism, and how
Boston baked beans were probably related to the Southern combination of ham hocks and navy beans. Bet he couldn't wait to get home and test both recipes.

There was an even better encounter before we were seated. Molly had been invited to the VIP cocktail party that preceded the seated dinner. Shortly after arriving at Austin's downtown Marriott Hotel, I released Molly from the responsibility of introducing me around. I knew our table number and we agreed to meet there. So there I was, having staked out a strategic spot to do what I love to do anywhere: watch people. After a while, I noticed a familiar face looking as though he might be people-watching too. So I summoned up the courage to engage him under the guise of going to the bar. He smiled. I smiled. I secured liquid fortification and headed toward the smiling man. I introduced myself and said he looked really familiar.

He nodded and smiled some more. I asked him if he lived in Austin. No, he said. He asked me if I lived in Austin, I told him no, I live in Denver, but I'm visiting a friend. He smiled. I smiled. I reiterated my feeling that I'd seen him before. Maybe, he said. So being as I'm from St. Louis I thought maybe I knew him from there. And as I asked him if he was from the Gateway to the West, Molly saw me and walked in our direction. He perked up and greeted her by name.

“Ah, Sweetsie,” she said, invoking the nickname she conferred on me from time to time, “I see you've met my friend Salman Rushdie.” At that point I prayed for a hole to swallow me and to do so quickly. Molly dined out on that story for weeks. I mean, shoot, it's not like I didn't say I knew his face from
somewhere
. . . . It certainly broke me of ever again suggesting that I might recognize people because I thought they were from St. Louis.

I liked that I could make Molly laugh. Through alternating waves of internal smiles gleaned from silly and somber moments and bone-deep sadness, I kept returning to food memories and decided they are a good way to remember people you care about.

The notion of creating a chronicle of cooking with Molly probably began percolating when Bonnie Tamres-Moore and her husband, Gary Moore, approached me during the 2007 Texas Book Festival. I was part of a panel discussion about Molly, which had been held in the same church where her memorial service had drawn standing-room-only mourners only ten months earlier.

Fellow panelists held forth with all manner of erudite observations. I was sandwiched between Lou Dubose and author and humorist Roy Blount Jr., and award-winning documentary filmmaker Paul Stekler was the fourth panelist.

They addressed the hows and wherefores of research; engaging an audience through the deft use of humor; and the importance of historical accuracy. All I could talk about was cooking with Molly. I realized after the session that hardly anyone knew she was an outstanding cook and as clever in the kitchen as she was on the page. Only a small band knew. Food stories slid into conversation sideways if at all.

I had found a parking space just in front of the church, and the Moores and I stood talking for a while. They insisted that people would be interested in knowing more about Molly's kitchen skills. I thanked them for their kind comments. They gave me a cooking game they had just bought called Food Fight. I thanked them again and went back to Denver. A year later I realized they were onto something I hadn't considered.

Anthony Zurcher, who for nine years was Molly's editor at Creators Syndicate (the outfit that made it possible for readers across the country to read her), was frequently in touch with Molly and shared intermittent lunches. Her destination of choice was almost always the Eastside Cafe.

“Whenever we went there someone always knew her,” he said. “Molly was great at holding court, being warm and generous with her time. After I moved to California I returned to Austin periodically and usually took her to lunch. Once she asked me if lunch was coming out of my pocket or Creators'. When I said it was on the company, she laughed and said, ‘Well, in that case let's have dinner at Jeffrey's [a high-dollar, white-linen Austin restaurant popular with local powerbrokers]!'”

Like others, Zurcher attended many end-of-the-month gatherings held for years at Molly's house. Known as Final Friday, it was a catchall, salon-hootenanny-ribald-poetry-laced kind of evening generously endowed with beer and food, sometimes in that order. “Mostly I remember casseroles and tamales and salsa and queso and chips on award plaques she used as trivets,” he added.