Just when we are about to forget the horror that is Jane Fonda, something else always comes up. Margaret Carlson of Time devoted her column to the queen of workout videos last week, beginning, "Where is Jane Fonda?"
Turns out Jane is off pushing condoms, because, as Carlson writes, an " enemy," the Republican Congress, has "attached strings to $ 250 million for sex education." To receive federal funds, Carlson notes, "schools must preach 'abstinence only' . . . Say the word condom, and you don't get a cent."
Enter Fonda, who, Carlson assures us, is concerned about the "below-the- waist aspects" of birth control, in the words of the revolutionary-turned- magnate's-wife. "While the rest of us have shed our anti-war activism along with our bell bottoms," writes Carlson, Fonda is still remembered for her " shag cut in Hanoi" and Barbarella. And "because we didn't let her grow up, she may have greater appeal to vulnerable teenagers than the icy perfection of a Nancy Reagan urging, 'Just say no!'" Fonda, you see, is "always more interested in making a difference than in making a movie."
And what a difference she made in Vietnam, where, shag cut and all, she commandeered a Communist anti-aircraft gun and, referring to American pilots as she mocked-fired into the air, said, "I wish I had them in my sights now."
In other Fonda news, La Jane appeared in a New York Times story about Patagonia, the region in southern Argentina that President Clinton visited recently and where Fonda and Ted Turner have an 11,000-acre pleasure ranch. Says Fonda, "I sometimes dream that there's a revolution in the United States and that we can't return and have to live [in Patagonia] forever."
Funny, Jane, some of us dream the same thing.