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Title: Kinky Friedman a 'Lone Ranger' on Trail
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URL Source: http://apnews.myway.com//article/20061022/D8KTE2R01.html
Published: Oct 22, 2006
Author: PAULINE ARRILLAGA
Post Date: 2006-10-22 01:14:41 by IndieTX
Keywords: KINKY
Views: 147
Comments: 4
HOUSTON (AP) - Richard Kinky Friedman is standing, sans cowboy boots, in his suite at the Hilton as a third day of election stumping ends, remote control in hand and Fox News on the tube. His campaign manager, heavy-lidded as the clock nears midnight, is doing his sleep-deprived best to reassure Texas' most unlikely gubernatorial candidate that he might just win. "We could still lose," Dean Barkley tells The Kinkster. "But we're not gonna." Friedman frets on. "It's possible that I'm a little pop star, everybody just wants a picture." Eyes roll, and Barkley retorts: "I'll get you a little security blanket." (AP) Kinky Friedman campaign volunteer Garrett Mauer, left, shows Texas independent gubernatorial... Friedman's attention returns to Fox. A segment about the race is on, and Friedman's delivering one of his oft-recycled cracks about the definition of politics - "Poly means more than one, and ticks are bloodsucking parasites." (The line was originated by "some guy in Corpus," explains Friedman, king of the one-liners. "It's not that great.") Now Gov. Rick Perry, the man whose job Friedman fancies, appears on screen delivering a crack of his own. "He's not running for class clown. He's running for the governor of a very important state." Barkley chuckles, but the barefoot clown gripping the remote isn't smiling - for once in his rather hysterical life. ---_ Day 1. San Antonio. A question: Who is Kinky Friedman? "He's a trip," says Ron, the driver of a Dollar Rent A Car shuttle. "Some people say he's a racist, but he's just being himself. That's what I think. I like his style - a 'Lone Ranger' type. They do their own thing. I like that." An hour later, Friedman - the songwriter, satirist, mystery novelist and now independent political candidate - is with Jesse Ventura and a gaggle of reporters at the University of Texas at San Antonio, starting a college campus swing with the former pro wrestler and governor of Minnesota. Ventura, taking a break from surfing in Baja, Mexico, and sporting a very surfer-like braided goatee, is offering some unsolicited advice about curtailing the sharp sense of humor that Friedman built a career on and molded him into The Kinkster. "You have to learn that political correctness unfortunately rules in the public sector," Ventura tells him. Friedman, in his signature black hat and boots, signature cigar in hand, is firmly resisting. "Political correctness is a real devil," he says. "It insinuates into our lives more than we think." With that, Friedman rams the cigar in his mouth and gives "The Body," as Ventura used to be called, a friendly pat on the back. Quintessential Kinky. Being himself. Doing his own thing. Sort of like ... a Lone Ranger. Just like Ron said. Ron, a black man with two diamond studs in one ear, big sunglasses and a bigger smile, who supported Perry in 2002. Ron, who has never in his life met Friedman, who when asked if he might vote for him smiled even bigger and said, "Nah." Ron, who nevertheless gets The Kinkster - who's not all that easy to get. What Kinky Friedman is: Hilarious. Crude. Biting. Unapologetic. Blunt. What he also is: Intellectual. Sensitive. Giving. Philosophical. Loyal. What he really is when you add it all up: Unconventional at every turn. So why would someone like this want a job as conventional as governor? One response is now a popular Friedman bumper sticker: "Why the hell not?" The real answer's more complex, kind of like the man himself. Friedman's books - from essay collections such as "'Scuse Me While I Whip This Out: Reflections on Country Singers, Presidents, and Other Troublemakers" to his mystery novels in which real-life rebels Willie Nelson and Hank Williams are characters - reveal someone who reveres the outlaw. That is, anyone with the cojones to thumb his or her nose at the system. Perhaps, in part, that's because Friedman grew up on the outside - a Jew raised by socially conscious, freethinking parents in Christian-conservative, 1950s-traditional Texas. He played chess, studied the classics at the University of Texas (where a friend bestowed upon him the nickname that stuck, reflecting Friedman's obsession with taming his untamable, kinky hair), and spent summers at the rural camp his parents started for children. His mother, Minnie, was a public school speech therapist, once named "Outstanding Texas Citizen" by an exchange-clubs organization. His father, Tom, flew an Air Force bomber during World War II and later was a psychology professor. Father Friedman liked to say, "Leave the world a better place than you found it," and his three children took that to heart. Daughter Marcie went to work for the American Red Cross, and son Roger eventually took over the kids' camp. Kinky, the eldest, simply put his own twist on the mantra. After a short stint with the Peace Corps in Borneo, he returned to the States with some songs in his pocket and an idea in his head. The result was career No. 1 as leader of the band, "Kinky Friedman and the Texas Jewboys." He penned songs that at times drew more boos than cheers, satirical ditties about the issues of the day: racism, feminism, even the 1966 massacre at UT when student Charles Whitman climbed an observation tower and fatally shot 16 people. One of Friedman's better-known songs, "They Ain't Makin' Jews Like Jesus Anymore," includes the n-word and a slew of other racially offensive terms but is a tune about one guy confronting another over his racist remarks. "We had something to offend everybody," Friedman says. "That was the idea - to puncture this pompous, morality kind of a thing." "We've always made fun, but underneath all of that it's about intellectualizing things and making people think," says original "Texas Jewboy" Jeff "Little Jewford" Shelby. Shelby, who met Friedman as a kid at the summer camp, is now chief of staff of the gubernatorial campaign (and also Friedman's announcer at each campaign stop.) "We like pushing the envelope," Shelby says, "but it's not just for the sake of pushing it." When the musical career floundered, Friedman managed to make a name for himself in career No. 2 - as a mystery writer and, later, a columnist at Texas Monthly magazine. The latter, in particular, gave him a new platform for skewering or championing whatever, or whomever, he wanted. Cigar-smokers: championed. Hunters: skewered. Bob Dylan: championed. Dell, Starbucks, the strip-mall sameness of America: skewered. The governor's thing, as the Friedman gang calls it, is not only a stab at career No. 3, it is yet another stage from which The Kinkster can take on the untouchable. The two-party system. The - his words now - "rusty cage of bureaucracy and corruption" that is democracy in the 21st century. The "wussification" of politics, and of Texas. "I love Texas," says Friedman. "I don't like what's happened to her. I don't like being last in all the good things and first in all the bad. The very least we can do is bring truth to the people. We're already bringing hope. The truth? Well, that's a little harder." --- Day 2. On the road from San Antonio to Houston. A thought: How does political incorrectness play in politics? "Please welcome the man who's breathing life into Texas independence, the next governor of the great state of Texas ... Kinky Friedmaaaaaaaaaaan!" The man with the cigar takes the podium at Trinity University in San Antonio, firing off warm-up lines like a Texafied Jerry Seinfeld. "I was showing my old friend around Austin recently. He said, 'Boy, that's a beautiful statue of Rick Perry.' And I said, 'That IS Rick Perry.'" Applause. Laughs. The jokes are expected; they vary little from stop to stop. What's not is how seriously some Texans are taking the guy who delivers them. Taylor Collier is 18, a freshman with shaggy hair and ear buds around his neck, clad in a T-shirt that reads, "TELL THE TRUTH." He's outside the auditorium at Trinity, reciting a story about the time Perry showed up at an event Collier attended a while back. "I couldn't even get up to him. I couldn't even talk to him. You know? But Kinky walks in here and I walk up to him just like, 'How you doing? Nice to meet you.' You know? To me, Kinky strikes me as more of a Texan." Needless to say, Collier's first vote in his first gubernatorial election is going to The Kinkster. So is that of 49-year-old Elva Romero, who works at a convenience store at Texas State University in San Marcos. "I'm for him," she says, "because I'm outspoken myself. Whatever comes to my mind is gonna come out, and that's it. If it's gonna hurt other people, well sorry. He's unique. He's different, and I think he can make a change ..." A Republican calling a Houston radio show apparently thinks so, too. Host Dan Patrick is musing over the Friedman phenomenon. Friedman is fourth among the four major gubernatorial candidates in money and support, and he's polling at about 14 percent. But that's almost equal with the Republican Perry's Democratic challenger, Chris Bell. "The public was really waiting for someone like him," Patrick surmises. "I agree," says the caller, who's especially fond of Friedman's pitch for more National Guard troops on the Texas border. When Friedman launched his campaign last year in front of the Alamo, calling for the "unconditional surrender" of Perry with a country swing band by his side, he was far more Jon Stewart than John Kennedy. Then he hired on Barkley, who directed Ventura's successful campaign and later replaced the late Paul Wellstone in the U.S. Senate. Friedman's 60-40 ratio of style-to-substance is now 40-60, says Barkley. The joke-laden speeches are sprinkled with Friedman's stance on legalizing casino gambling to help pay for education, decriminalizing marijuana to free up prison space, developing a taxpayer ID card for illegal immigrants to work. "We've packaged things a little differently," says Barkley. "But him telling what he really believes? No, that hasn't changed." No matter the consequences. The Texas NAACP asked Friedman to apologize after he remarked that "crackheads and thugs have decided they want to stay in Houston" in a speech lambasting rising crime that police in the city attribute to Hurricane Katrina evacuees. Friedman refused, responding: "I am not a racist, I am a realist." The group excluded Friedman from speaking at its convention this month, while inviting Perry, Bell and independent Carole Keeton Strayhorn. Then a television interview resurfaced in which Friedman was asked what to do about sexual predators, and he said, "Throw them in prison and throw away the key and make them listen to a Negro talking to himself." His political opponents jumped on the anti-Friedman bandwagon, also calling for an apology - exactly the kind of politics-as-usual stuff that gets Friedman, and his longtime friends, fired up. "I definitely know he's not a racist, because I know Kinky," says Ada Beverly, the 77-year-old daughter of Friedman's childhood caretaker, a black woman named Lottie Cotton, whom Friedman adored. "Kinky is just a wonderful, folk-loving person. He's not gonna whup it around and pretend he's one thing if he's another. "But once you get Kinky into your heart," Beverly says, "you have a most lovable person." --- Day 3. Texas A&M University, Perry's alma mater. A revelation: There really is another side to Kinky Friedman. It's the last stop of a long day, and 61-year-old Friedman is exhausted. He's munching on peanut butter crackers, having gone without nourishment for 10 hours. But the line for autographs stretches on, and Friedman won't leave until the last picture is snapped and T-shirt is signed (or cell phone, or empty Marlboro pack). "He doesn't want to disappoint anybody," Sandy Wolfmueller later explains. She's known Friedman for 30 years, owns a bookstore where he does signing events. She recalls a time when the two of them had some falling out. Then her son died of a degenerative brain disease. "Don't ask me how he found out," she says, "but Kinky was one of the first to call." Another fan: "He's got the biggest heart. All he does is save people and animals." That's Nancy Parker-Simons, who was tapped by Friedman to run an animal rescue ranch adjacent to his parents' summer camp outside of Kerrville. Friedman's own five dogs are watched over while he's on the road by a Katrina evacuee Friedman's putting up at his house. Parker-Simons admits emitting a snicker or two when Friedman first broached the subject of running for governor. Now she realizes, "He really is serious about it." Besides, "Texans would love it. We like to brag and all of that. And, boy, we would have a blast with him!" It's at the Hilton, at the end of Day 3, with Fox News on the tube and the unsmiling clown staring at the set, that the punch line finally becomes clear: The funnyman's run for governor ain't no joke. Neither is Richard Kinky Friedman. Poster Comment: Kinky is for real. VOTE Texans!
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#1. To: IndieTX (#0)
I don't see Friedman winning. I just don't see it. The idea of an independent running Texas to the powers that be, is just wrong. They have their traitors hand picked in places of power, and Texas is one stronghold for evil. The people of Texas if they're going to vote, need to make it a fucking landslide for Kinky to win, because if it's close, it won't be close enough to win.
 | What's that Mr. Nipples? You want me to ask the nice lady about her rack?. |
#2. To: TommyTheMadArtist (#1)
it really is. the injustice system here is frightening.
They have their traitors hand picked in places of power, and Texas is one stronghold for evil.
When it comes to heroes, Renegades are mine..
#3. To: All, christine, lodwick, ferret mike (#0)
I voted today aginst the whores and cast my ELECTRONIC MACHINE VOTE [like it will really count] for KINKY FRIEDMAN! All other races I voted straight Libertarian and when the D's R's were unopposed, I voted "none of the above." It felt damn good voting against GoodHair, Bell and Strayhorn, and also against Hutchison and Joe Barton [the sponsor of the "sell the internet to big telecom" bill!]. Caleb turned the dial and pushed the enter button every time..LOL. It may not do any good, but at least I'll be able to sleep at night when more innocents are jailed for having a God-given plant in their possession...when the mile wide scar on the land is built from Mexico covering 500,000 acres of farmland in cement by GoodHair Perry. The last 4 pages of an 8 page ballot were all local races [commissioners,judges, etc] and they were ALL REPUBLICAN and ALL UNOPPOSED BY ANYONE...so I voted "none of the above" on them as well.
Law Enforcement Against Prohibition
#4. To: TommyTheMadArtist. Texans, and Texans in heart here (#1)
The freaking black-boxes are the wild card here: until we get back to hand-counted ballots at the precinct level, we will be screwed, blued, and tatooted as far as our votes count. imo (and BevHarris and others) Why the Hell Not? How Hard can it be? Go Kink.
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