Goodbye, Kinky
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Editorial

Goodbye, Kinky

You know how some celebrity deaths hit you really hard?

The news about Kinky Friedman got me.

Part of it was how he managed to feel like someone you knew. And really, what? I don’t know anybody who would write “They Ain’t Makin Jews Like Jesus Anymore.” To be fair, I don’t know anyone who could write it, in terms of either its total shamelessness or its unabashed cleverness.

And then there was “Ride Em, Jewboy,” a song where Kinky did what he so often did — he managed to merge the essential loneliness of the image of the cowboy — and of the cattle he drove to market, shades of Dona Dona — with Jewish tropes. “I’m, I’m with you boy/If I’ve got to ride six million miles.”

My husband and I saw him twice. First, years ago, when he was youngish and we were younger, at the Lone Star Café in Manhattan, the downtown place with the huge iguana on the roof. (Don’t ask.) He was hilarious. Still years ago but years and years later, we saw him, old by then, at the Jewish festival in Commack, out on Long Island, puffy but still funny and still outrageous.

And I’d read his books, mysteries that incorporated real people, stories that were clever and smart but also increasingly tiresome. He must have thought so too; eventually he stopped writing them.

But the thing about Kinky Friedman — outrageous provocateur, ridiculously funny, aspiring but always failed politician, too clever by half — was that underneath, as his obituaries pointed out, was an unmistakable sweetness. Under the raunch was pure earnestness.

His parents, academics from Chicago, owned a ranch in Texas that they turned into a summer camp called Echo Hill ranch.

Decades later, Kinky and his sister, Marcie, reopened the camp, this time for the children of a parent who had been in the military or a first responder, and had died. Campers paid nothing for their summer experinces.

Kinky sounds like the old definition of a native Israeli, a sabra — tough on the outside, soft inside — except that Kindy was less tough than he was sui generis outrageous.

The Washington Post ends its obituary of the Kinkster with a story about camp that’s too good not to repeat:

“Mr. Friedman also ran an animal shelter on the property, hosting a Thanksgiving feast for lost and abandoned dogs who offered a howling, tail-wagging accompaniment to his guitar playing.”

So pardon the sentiment, but “I’m, I’m with you, boy/If I’ve got to ride six million miles.” Also, woof.

—JP

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