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Ann: an appreciation.

Article Excerpt
THE FIRST TIME I SAW ANN RICHARDS she was playing bridge with old friends at the home of Fletcher and Libby Boone in the hills overlooking Austin. With kids whooping in the bedrooms, a half-dozen card games uproarious in the living room, and much strong drink poured in the kitchen, I was parked on a sofa. I had been invited to the Sunday night tradition because I was courting Dorothy Browne, one of Ann's old friends and, later, her devoted and trusted aide in state government. It was a hard crowd to overshadow, but that never daunted Ann. She was 47 then, a Travis County commissioner. She was a very attractive woman; for all the premature facial lines and a hairstyle that harked back to a time when "permanent" was used as a noun, sexiness was a distinct part of her bearing. When she turned it on, she was all blue eyes and dimples.

She cocked an eyebrow at the dubious prospects of the hand she'd been dealt, leaned back in her chair, and said, "I've just got to tell you all about club," stretching one syllable into three. "We have such a good time at club. We just talk and talk. And when we get to the end, we vote on what'll be our next topic of discussion. I think I'm going to propose vaginal itch."

The bawdy and rowdy feminist was a well-known side of Ann. But something else underlay her crack about the stuffiness and pretensions of social clubs. In a crowd that was well juiced and thought nothing of it, she was talking about the newness and rawness of her commitment to Alcoholics Anonymous. A few Sundays before, her family and close friends had, with great pain of their own, reduced her to sobs in the ordeal of intervention. She walked into a house in West Lake Hills, and on seeing them all, she responded with the instinctive fright of a mother: "Are the children all right?" Hours later she was on a plane to a treatment hospital in Minneapolis. She later said she'd tried to fight off their pleas and their harsh evidence of what she was doing to herself, and to them, because she thought that if she quit drinking, she'd lose her gift for being funny.

"I was terrified," she wrote of the trip to Minneapolis in her first book, Straight From the Heart. "I was a public person, there was no way I could survive it." Ann's long marriage to David Richards, a labor and civil rights lawyer who was also our friend and still is, came to an end in the same period. When Dorothy and I married, in 1982, we invited Ann to our wedding on Fletcher and Libby's lawn. She sent us...

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