Wins, losses in lifelong battle for rights, justice
care about,” the governor declared. “And now that he’s after a job that he can’t get appointed to, he’s like Columbus discovering America — he’s found child care, he’s found education.”
And then, the killer punch line: “Poor George, he can’t help it — he was born with a silver foot in his mouth.”
The governor had a great sense of humor but, her daughter reveals, she had some secret, seriously funny ghost writers, too — Lily Tomlin among them.
Cecile Richards later named her first child Lily to honor the comedian.
Ann Richards also had some serious problems. What her daughter had naively accepted as normal behavior eventually spun out of control: “Didn’t everyone's parents have two or three martinis before dinner?”
The family finally staged an intervention. Once out of rehab — or “drunk school” as the governor called it — Richards stayed sober.
Though the politician recognized the move saved her life, her daughter reveals, “I don't think she ever forgave any of us.”
Cecile Richards also remembers her own private challenges — like her choice, years ago, to have an abortion. She and her husband, both working more than full time and raising three school-age kids, felt they could “never do justice to a fourth.”
Knowing they didn’t have to was “a relief,” Richards says. As was finally, recently, talking about it — openly, matter-of-factly.
“The truth is, it wasn’t an agonizing decision for me,” she says. “It wasn’t tragic or dramatic — it was just my story.”
And she shares it here, along with the time she discovered a loudly progressive, secretly sexist employer was paying her only half what he paid a man.
Even as fiercely independent as she is, Richards, like most women, had a #MeToo moment when groped at a summer job. She stayed silent, because “I was terrified of losing the opportunity.”
Mostly, though, “Make Trouble” is about raising hell and having a good time doing it. Each chapter starts with a Richards memory of the great music and good food she associates with that time.
Richards remembers a Planned Parenthood event during the 2008 campaign when the organization handed out packages of pink condoms marked, “Protect Yourself Against John McCain.”
She recalls watching McCain boldly casting the decisive, thumbs-down vote not to gut Obamacare, convinced her late mother was watching and “laughing her ass off.”
Keeping her sense of humor is clearly one way Richards keeps the fight going. Like getting through a grueling congressional interrogation on Planned Parenthood by noticing that Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.), “with his face all scrunched up and twisted with anger, looked just like Draco Malfoy in ‘Harry Potter.’ ”
Nearly 50 years after that schoolgirl started making trouble, she’s still at it. And hopes we’ll join her.
“So what are you waiting for?” she asks. “Caring is no longer enough; it’s time to act. After all, what’s the worst that could happen?”