Ruth Gordon ROCKS, Okay

updated March 21, 1996 (per request of the loyal following, all pages will show when updated...Babble is done most frequently, so it is good to bookmark this page for changes....)

I LOVE RUTH GORDON. If you have been a reader of any of the books, I never did mention Ruth Gordon in any of the 20/20 Amour Heindzeidt, because, frankly, the idea of sleeping with her never appealed to me.

She was born and raised in Massachusetts not very far from where I would cash my unemployment checks. Although she had movie roles early in her career, the later part of her life was speckled with memorable characters. Or, should I say, she played the same woman very well. As a guest star on Columbo, as Maude in Harold and Maude...( I still wonder if Bud Cort shouldn't have played that movie as Harold and Marvin... but the early 70's just weren't that ready for much more reality with Nixon, Nam, and Russ Meyers)....as the tea making matron in Rosemary's Baby, Clint Eastwood's pistol packing mama in the Any Which Way to Sell series...she was unmistakable as the non bullshit oriented granny with an impish grin.

I guess if anyone could pick their family, Ruth Gordon would have been on my first round draft ticket. (A sports reference to please the four guys at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill who have written to me since last April..) The one gesture I remember most about her was the way she would make a point by raising her fist in the air, and hammer at the words that would drift from her mouth to above her head to the right. She was also adept at sitting back and making a point by pursing her lips and coyly stating a scripted sentence as if it were written by a phone sex operator. I think this is what Sharon Stone was trying to imitate in Basic Instinct in that one infamous scene.

It's been what, ten or more years since she's died. She didn't pull a Maude, and aid the process. She just stopped living. Mortality. The Cycle of Life. It Sucks, doesn't it? Most of those who have been writing to me have watched their friends around them die early. Aids and gunshots. The cycle of life expectancy has seemed to take an interesting turn of events. We are in a generation that has us wondering if we will get to see old age.

Personally, I really hadn't thought much about it until I got married. It's funny how short life seems to be when you find someone to share it with for the rest of it. While I counted funeral attendance as a monthly event, I never wondered if I was going to be on the list. Statistically I have a much better chance than one of my favorite friends. I am a white female non-smoker who has made it past 30.

Tyrell is an eighteen year old black male son of an unemployed man and a disabled mom living in Venice Beach. He gets followed by LA's finest, skirted past by white women shopping in the Beverly Center, and stared at by small children when he rides the bus. Nobody's ever heard that before. But, as long as the media portrays "black" as "evil", and as long as racists like Farakhan portray African American men as some sort of new Reich, this will never change. Tyrell is a prelaw student, and wants to be part of the destruction of the media's power of stereotype. He is firm in his belief that it will kill him otherwise. Until he is proven wrong I think it's our duty...webmasters, desktop publishers, computer geeks, and the intelligencia to keep our minds wide open in order to get the full stories behind the printed or televised word, and to dismiss this ridiculous grasp on racism the media places into us with the conviction of a zealot.

Ruth Gordon would have played a character that would have said we need to "Fight Fight Fight". Between Ruth Gordon and Frank Zappa, I would often grapple with who would have made a better president.