More Marilyn Hagerty! You Betcha!
Click here for a TV interview with the Sheriff Marge of the Grand Forks food beat. I love this sweet old lady. She has an output that would put most newspaper columnists to shame: five columns per week, including her “Dear Shirley” letter to her sister. Here’s the latest Dear Shirley. Excerpt:
The restaurants are crowded. The beaches are peppered with sunbathers. The palm trees sway in the gentle breezes on the southwest coast of Florida.
One week of these idyllic surroundings was all I could manage. All I could handle! So I pulled the collar of my jacket tightly around my neck as I got off the airplane in Minneapolis and made my way to the A section of the airport to catch the final lap in the journey home to Grand Forks.
… I’ve got to say I like Grand Forks, Shirley. Winter is fun watching sports, plays and hearing concerts as well as playing bridge. And when spring comes to the Red River Valley you have a feeling that you are born again. You congratulate yourself on being tough and making it through yet another winter.
I checked a news magazine rack in the Minneapolis airport with scintillating headlines. They included, “Whitney Houston’s Autopsy Secrets” and “Burn 300 calories in 22 minutes—lose that arm jiggle.” Then there was a headline asking, “Is everyone kinkier than you?” And another saying, “Flatten your belly.”
So I bought a Minneapolis Star-Tribune for 75 cents.
The sweetness and naivete here is easy to laugh at, but it makes me think of one of my all-time favorite films, “Fargo.” Remember the final scene, with Sheriff Marge’s monologue? You realize, after everything that has gone before, that the simple, unintentionally comic goodness of Marge is in fact a sign of her moral greatness. I can’t think of another film that, by the end, makes evil look so pathetic and ridiculous, and makes the kind of goodness that we start out laughing at for being so dorky appear profound, because, well, it is.
Look, I’m not making moral claims for Marilyn Hagerty’s restaurant reviews. But I bet Marilyn is a deeply good woman.
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