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.