Madonna LaFleche
Dead Rebels can be anyone, at any time, living any where. They don’t always leave a legacy for the masses to tell their grandchildren about – hell, they don’t even need to have a name that screams out at you from tabloid headlines. Rebellion doesn’t have to command mass attention to leave a mark. A great rebel I knew passed into the realm of the Dead Rebels last week, and this is my effort to try and describe for you the mark she left on those of us closest to her.
This one’s going to be a hard one to write. It’s difficult to convey to strangers how much impact a friend can have on your life or how big of a hole they can leave when they’re gone. There’s no guarantee that you’ll understand readily what made my friend special, more worthy of note than any of the other millions of people who died last week. But it’s said that God is in the details, and it’s with details that I will try to construct a portrait of this rebel, Madonna LaFleche.
I suppose her name, as loaded as it is, is an easy place to start. Being named after the mother of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ is a heavy burden in and of itself; the fact that it also wound up being the name of one of the last century’s most readily-recognized superstars upped the ante of that tag to an almost ridiculous degree. No wonder, then, that she preferred to be addressed by a tomboyish-sounding, one-syllable nickname, "Bud".
She chose the nickname herself, basing it on two key factors of what made her so singularly Bud: her work with children (who found "Bud" easier to say than "Madonna"), and her off-duty affinity for smoking pot. Anyone who knows me knows that this affinity alone would be enough to make Bud and I fast friends, but she took this activity to a higher level than merely sitting down and imbibing until an overwhelming craving for Cheetos set in. For Bud, getting high was a personal sacrament, as well as a bonding experience. She shared it with her husband, three out of four of her children (only in Bud’s family could the kid who didn’t get high be classified as "the different one") and any friends in need of a sounding board and sympathetic ear.
If you stopped by Bud’s place in need of guidance, that guidance would always come with a bowl or a spliff, consumed at her kitchen table while the life of her family moved around her like the hands of a clock. But she didn’t need the weed to make her personal orbit a little slower and easier to take than everyone else’s; it was her own nature to turn a conversation over and around in her fingers like a worry stone and to consider all sides of a dilemma at length before offering a solution. Bud could be brisk and efficient when it was needed, but she preferred to be able to do the important things at length, making sure all angles were considered.
This woman I loved lived a life rich in detail. It was important for her to have small luxuries, beautiful items in her personal space. She had an artist’s eye for arranging random items into still life portraits, and for making a room into an altar for her quirky tastes. You could sit down in a room of Bud’s and be who you were, quirks and all. And at the end of the day her insistence on just a little more color and a little more beauty found in the average woman’s life was only a small outer manifestation of the strength inside of her, strength that defeated cancer three times, that survived the collapse of a thirty-plus-year-old marriage, that enabled her to raise a defiant middle finger to all of the elements of nature and bad luck that conspired to ensnare and consume her. She fought her way out of fix after fix armed only with her resolve, royal purple garments, and her stash.
On the night before Bud died I was privileged to be able to sit down and read a few items that she’d written over the years. If things had worked out a little differently, a "Life According to Bud" column would definitely have been within the realm of the possible here at DRS. The biggest reason she liked to be surrounded as much as possible with color and beauty was that her eyes were keener than most. Hers were eyes that saw everything, and understood everything that they were seeing. While I’m not a terribly religious or even a "spiritual" person, I do like to think that wherever she is now, there is a good view.
