RUBY TUESDAY: Our Reporter Takes A Few Shots Of Whiskey And Covers A City Commission Meeting...

By RON MEXICO
Staff Writer

HARLINGEN, Texas - The words bounced through the crowd like tractor-sized boulders. "Did she say she was going to kick Lefty's ass?" whispered a blue-haired elderly woman dressed in wrinkled Republican clothing. Receiving the strange question, one rarely heard in council chambers, a man in a Lyndon Baines Johnson Stetson hat said this in return, "Nope, think Kori just told Robert to go stick it up his ass." It was only the beginning of what became the rolling monologue of last night's Harlingen City Commission meeting, Chapter 12, Verse 23.

"Kori just told Commissioner Leftwich that she's way smarter than he is!" gasped another resident in a seat near the front row. "Can you believe it? She had the gumption to say, 'I'm smarter than you!' And Leftwich is just sittin' there, takin' this bullshit from this uppity woman!" To his left, a hefty, white woman with a tattoo of a blue parrot on her upper right arm, turned to tell him: "Why, we simply cannot have that. Lefty is our man up there, and he ought to be confronting that missy. Heavens to Betsy, what is happenin' to Harlingen?"

From the back row came a wild one: "The sheriff is a nigger!"

"What?!" exclaimed a high-necked woman with eyebrows thrown to the ceiling.

"He said the sheriff is near," she heard from someone seated nearby.

And so went the latest episode of the local governmental meeting, now known in town as "Blazing Saddles II," starring, for the most part, Commissioner Kori Marra as the villain and Commissioner Robert Leftwich as the unassuming do-gooder. I covered the meeting for The Tribune, and, Lawdy, Lawdy, Miss Clawdy, I swear I was sitting between a guy who looked strikingly like Lucas McCain to my left and Matt Dillon to my right. Behind me sat an over-dressed sweetheart every man kept calling "Miss Kitty." I dunno, I dunno. This town is going bananas, as Woody Allen might say about here.

After the meeting, this curly-haired dude who looked like Sylvester Stallone in Rambo stopped me to say this: "That is a complete distortion. She (Commissioner Marra) was simply supporting the City Attorney. Yet, Leftwich continued to argue with the both of them. I considered him to be the one way out of line. No question. His anger towards Marra was blatantly obvious."

I inhaled deeply and said, "Hey, who am I to blow against the wind..."

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