Molly Ivins, still kicking ass and having fun.
Sitting at the dining room table in her ranch-style home, still wearing the black velvet hat and matching black pants she wore to Richards’ service, Ivins is reminded that cancer is not always the chronic-but-manageable disease she herself has battled since 1999.
It often kills.
“This disease is so not fair!” Ivins lets loose, one hand clenched in a fist.
Then something happens. The moment passes, the sorrow lifts, and suddenly, Texas’ best-known leftist columnist returns to the one-liners that have become her trademark and catapulted her to national recognition.
“I’m sorry to say (cancer) can kill you but it doesn’t make you a better person,” she says.
There. She may have poor balance, only a few patches of hair on her head and no assurance her breast cancer won’t undo her in the end, but Ivins is still the sharp-witted, irreverent, funny provocateur who’s been excoriating politicians, even liberal ones, since the day she set down her size-11 foot in the Texas Legislature nearly four decades ago.
Please get well, Molly. Between Ann Richards and Don Walser, Texas doesn’t need to be losing any more icons any time soon.