Steel Magnolias

There is a certain type of older lady one can find in any small Southern town. You will see her tooling around in her brand-new Cadillac (preferably white), windows and nose firmly up. She is immaculately coiffured and painted, and her clothes are screamingly chic. It would not surprise you to walk into the local Sunrise Biscuit at 8 a.m. and encounter said lady wearing an electric blue couture Ungaro cocktail dress capped off by a full length fox-tail fur coat. In July.

She is usually the proprietor of her own successful business, yet gets along with nobody, especially not her immediate family. And she is completely and utterly looney. Mad as a hatter, nutty as a fruitcake, crazy as a shit-house rat. She has a persecution complex as big as the plantation her old-money family used to own, convinced that everyone is beneath her and out to "get" her in some mysteriously incomprehensible way. I always enjoy the company of these ladies immensely. *Caveat: Go out to dinner with them, just don't work for them. Trust me.*

They are the proto-feminists; while their sisters played safe by getting married and having kids, these grand old dames mucked around with business and played with the big boys, effectively, if somewhat bitchily, paving the way for us later gals to get where we are today.

In the particular town I live in her name is Sadie, and she has been waging a glorious war against the local government for the last twenty years. The origins of the rift are murky, but it appears to have all started with a botched paint job on her turn-of-the-century house on Main Street. She refused to pay the painters, they refused to come back and fix it, she dug in her heels (they were probably out to get her), and that was that. The paint began to slowly fade and peel in long obnoxious strips, the end result being her house now reminds one of Miss Haversham's crib in Great Expectations.

The state of Sadie's house, being right in the midst of the local poobahs and their "society" wives, caused an uproar. The City Council got involved after a couple of years. They sent letters, they begged, pleaded and cajoled to no avail. Sadie was famously seen cussing out the Mayor in front of the local Post-Office when he dared broached the subject of her "eyesore". It was a town scandal, and has generally entertained the non-society populace for quite some time.

So I had mixed feelings when I read in the local paper that the Council had finally managed to bully through a "beautification ordinance" last week. We all know why that ordinance was passed and who it is aimed at. Another magnolia seems doomed to wither and fall.