Southpaw Jones

Anna Nicole Smith passed away today, after I wrote this about my fictional Super Bowl party:

I wasn’t going to invite Anna Nicole Smith, but I found a journal entry from a 15-year-old Southpaw that reads, “Older Southpaw, if you’re reading this, please don’t ever stop trying to meet Anna Nicole Smith. I don’t care how fat or skinny or old or deranged or married she becomes. She’s always a woman to me.”

So, ok, for my 15-year-old Southpaw, I called her up. (I also attended an Aerosmith concert.) Anyhoo, she couldn’t quite grasp the directions to my place, so she never showed up.

There was a time when Anna Nicole Smith was a wonderful personification of American beauty, excess, and desire. Before we heard her talk. Before her marriage to a rich, dying man. Before the reality show. Before the weight gain. Before the weight loss. She was the Playmate of the Year and the face of Guess Jeans. For a while there, America praised the wonder of a decidedly non-skinny woman before slithering back into its love affair with poles and sticks.

As a shallow, horny teenager, I thought Anna Nicole was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen. She was sexy but coy, young but motherly, hillbilly yet sorority, strong but feminine, rural and urban, modern but classic, all at once. There was also the small matter of that massive smile and those eager eyes. She had breasts that could feed the hungry of the world twice over. She was a wild, crazy Texas woman.

Now, as troubled as our country is, A.N.S. is probably more representative than role-models like Hilary Clinton, Angelina Jolie, and Oprah Winfrey. We kill citizens of an ancient land for oil; Anna drilled an ancient man for dough. Everyone around her told her she was perfect, so she never felt the need to learn anything or really do anything. She sought out comfort and pleasure and friends and family, and who among us can truly claim any better?

Call me crazy, but for a while there in the 1990’s, she was our Marilyn Monroe. If that’s overstating things, well, she was my Marilyn Monroe. And just like Marilyn, she never knew who to cling to when the rain set in.

I would have liked to have known you, but I was just a kid. Nowadays, I’m not certain I could stand 15 minutes of conversation with you. But I guess we’ll never know.

Good-bye, Anna. American woman, mama rest in peace.