Let's Welcome a new 'Southerner' - Commentary by Lewis Regenstein

Let's Welcome a New Southerner - Commentary by Lewis Regenstein

My Fellow Chekhovians (I'll explain in a minute):

We have a new member of the Southern nation, let's give her a warm welcome to our movement.

She's a well known, controversial (aren't we all ?) celebrity who isn't afraid to take an unpopular stand.

We can certainly use someone like her.

It's my fellow Atlantan, Jane Fonda, AKA Hanoi Jane, who has a new book and movie out she's plugging !

And now she's claiming to be a Southerner.

Well shut my mouth...or at least hers.

Yes, here it is in black & white (below), in Saturday's Atlanta Journal Constitution (AJC.com) "Living" section, a long, front page article on the top, telling us about Jane's "emerging as a 'solo, shorthaired Southerner':"

Explaining her new-found love for the South, Fonda writes: "most of my life I had lived in sophisticated relatively privileged coastal cities like Los Angeles and New York. I had grown weary of criticism about people in those places being elitists, out of touch with the American mainstream...It had taken my move to Georgia [sic] to show me that those criticisms were at least partly true.
Writes Fonda: I like the Chekhovian nature of the South: a slowness, a love of talk for its own sake, the friendliness and humor, the jokes, like heirlooms passed back and forth and an acceptance of people's idiosyncracies....And where else can you hear expressions like 'frog strangler' and 'lower than a pregnant duck ?' "

Yes, she's truly One of Us, bless her heart.

OK, she left out a few other things we admire, like patriotism, respect for the military, opposition to communism, repugnance of treason, love of country & traditional values, etc....But hey, nobody's perfect.

And so what if none of us has ever heard any of those Southern expressions she cites ?

Let's not pass up this opportunity to recruit a new member....Is there and SCV camp or LOS chapter who would like to invite Jane to join up ? Is there a Chekhov SCV camp ? Or maybe she can start her own Ho Chi Minh SCV camp.

OK, there's that small matter of Treason, when she visited those peace-loving socialists in North Vietnam during the unpleasantness of the 70's and was filmed climbing up on that anti-aircraft gun and posing for propaganda photos. Even she calls it a "betrayal."

But maybe she was just trying to shoot down Lt. John McCain.

Anyway, as Saddam Hussein must have been thinking when he was captured by US troops last year, , can't we let bygones be bygones ?

Of course, she might not want to join one of our groups, unless we can promise her meetings with three way sex, which she describes in detail having while married to producer Roger Vadim (He was French, so that explains that), even soliciting that third partner herself -- or so I read in the newspapers, not having bought her new book whose title I will not plug here....not that any reader here would buy it.

But if no one else wants her as a member, maybe she can just join the Dixie Chicks, she might be more comfortable with them anyway.

By the way, I looked up Anton Chekhov (1860-1904), he was a Russian short story writer -- wouldn't you know he'd be a foreigner, and a Russian at that ! --and the Random House Dictionary defines "Chekhovian" as "evocative of a mood of introspection and frustration."

Well, that's not too far off, but isn't it great the way the media keeps defining Southerners for us. We've gone from being racist, illiterate bigots to frustrated introspective Russian Jane Fondas ! But are we going forward or backwards ?

Maybe someone should tell Jane that being an Atlantan does not make her a real Southerner, or even a Georgian -- just ask anyone who lives down here. Someone once defined Atlanta as a city surrounded on four sides by Georgia.

But at least she has given us something to introspect on ....like how Jane's being called a Southerner makes us feel "lower than a pregnant duck."

I do feel like strangling someone, but it's not a frog.

Lewis Regenstein, a native Atlantan, is a descendant of over two dozen Confederate soldiers. {regenstein@mindspring.com}

Fonda Recalls rocky marriage with Turner

Fonda recalls rocky marriage with Turner

Richard L. Eldredge - Staff, Atlanta Journal Constitution
Saturday, April 2, 2005

Just a month into their 1991 marriage, Jane Fonda discovered that her husband, Ted Turner, was cheating on her. She put the pieces together while sitting in a car waiting for Turner at CNN Center downtown when she spotted Turner's lunchtime conquest hiding behind a pillar.

"I remember sitting there, my heart pounding, my mind imploding," Fonda writes in her new autobiography "My Life So Far," due out Tuesday but available on some local shelves Friday. "Ted was ashen when he got into the car, behind the wheel. That's when I began hitting him about the head and shoulders with the car phone. . . . I poured my water bottle over his head and crying and shaking, said, 'I sure hope it was great . . . , because you just blew it with me. I'm outta here."

Turner and Atlanta take on starring roles in the last third of Fonda's memoir as she writes about her complicated relationship with the CNN founder, the formation of for her now decade-old, nonprofit Georgia Campaign for Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention, cheering the Atlanta Braves on to a World Series victory and eventually emerging as a "solo, shorthaired Southerner."

A media blitz for the book is scheduled to begin with an exclusive "60 Minutes" interview on Sunday night.

Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter, Andrew Young, Chipper Jones and Greg Maddux all merit mentions in the book along with photographs from her star-studded Atlanta G-CAPP premieres with Dolly Parton, Lily Tomlin and Robert Redford.

But it's the passages about Fonda's fascinatingly complex relationship with Turner that may prove most irresistible for local readers.

A day after her divorce from activist Tom Hayden hit the papers, Turner was on the phone asking for a date. When Fonda informed him that "dating was the furthest thing from my mind," she writes that Turner replied, "I know just how you feel. I just broke up with my mistress."

Writes Fonda in "My Life So Far": "It occurred to me that this was just about the most inappropriate thing a man could say to a woman who had just been dumped by her husband of sixteen years for his mistress."

Fonda also reveals that Turner frequently confused the word "magnanimous" for "monogamous."

After his infidelity, Fonda says Turner pursued her back to California and pleaded for another chance on bended knee. Fonda agreed on three conditions: "that he would never betray me again, would never see the woman again and go to counseling with me." Fonda writes that Turner agreed to all three but strayed again in the final months of their marriage, "when he sensed the marriage was doomed and was looking for a substitute."

Fonda writes that her growing interest in religion and spirituality also drove a wedge between them. She writes that she hid her developing Christianity from him.

"I knew if I had discussed with him my need for spirituality, he would have either asked me to choose between him and it or bullied me out of it."

After agreeing to separate in 2000, Fonda writes that "her replacement" was waiting for Turner at his airport hangar on a return flight to Atlanta. "My seat was still warm," she writes.

After her amicable divorce from Turner, Fonda decided to remain in Atlanta, a decision that "took many of my New York and California friends by surprise."

Explaining her new-found love for the South, Fonda writes: "Most of my life I had lived in sophisticated, relatively privileged coastal cities like Los Angeles and New York. I had grown weary of criticism about people in those places being elitists, out of touch with the American mainstream. . . . It had taken my move to Georgia to show me that those criticisms were at least partly true."

Writes Fonda: "I like the Chekhovian nature of the South: a slowness, a love of talk for its own sake, the friendliness and humor, the jokes, like heirlooms passed back and forth and an acceptance of people's idiosyncrasies. . . And where else can you hear expressions like 'frog strangler' and 'lower than a pregnant duck?' "