Happy birthday, Roxi: My friend Roxi Mueller, film critic of the Cleveland Plain Dealer from 1983 to 1988, would have been 50 today. You can still find her name on the Web, because the best in show at the annual Cleveland Film Festival is given the Roxanne T. Mueller Award — an honor she would have loved, second only to interviewing her admired Barbra Streisand (there is a quarterly Barbra magazine, and Roxi subscribed to it). She was famous for her Oscar night parties, and for predicting the major winners (23-1 in her four years on the Plain Dealer), and for cheering the good (Infra-Man) and demolishing the bad (Bo Derek) among popcorn movies and artistic flicks alike.
Raised in the small farm town of Wells, Minn., movie-mad Roxi — she was happiest when screening and reviewing 10 or 12 films a week — worked as a feature and entertainment writer at newspapers in Mankato and Fort Wayne before getting a master's in film and communication at the University of Iowa, where she was arts and entertainment editor of the Daily Iowan and close companion of a fellow grad student and columnist. I'm tempted to, but shouldn't, imply Roxi and I were more of a romantic couple than we were; it's more truthful to say she was one of a few women I flung myself at in my 20's who found me a good friend but didn't find a torrid spark; during the final week her friend Donna Dichtel cried to me over the phone, "You are her knight in shining armor," and the heartbreaking thing was it wasn't true.
But we were great pals, and maybe more than that, although I teased her about the time I made a special trip to meet her in Boston during the press junket for The Verdict and she paid little attention to her date because she'd just had a private interview with Paul Newman. We were in touch for seven years, even after her colitis proved to be colon cancer and she had surgery in the fall of '87, then had to return to the hospital the following February. I was living in New Hampshire then and wrote cards almost daily, telling her about my astral projection with her on the balcony or down the hall at the candy machine; it became such a habit that a few days after March 8, 1988, I found myself mentally composing the day's card, "Dearest Roxi, Your mom sent a copy of the Plain Dealer obituary, I think the quotes they chose weren't your best but the photo was lovely."
And I did visit her in the hospital in Cleveland for a couple of days in mid-February, read to her and watched the Olympics and N.H. primary news, and one evening the guy she was dating came in and we stood glaring and puffing out our chests at each other like teenage boys. I think Roxi liked that. She was 36.
8:39:51 AM 
|
|
