What, exactly, possessed former Denver Post food writer Ellen Sweets to write a recipe-studded memoir about her friendship with late newspaper columnist Molly Ivins ... a meal, and you sit ...

the loss of this singular soul really hit home as I read of legendary roundups at the bounteous and delicious table of Ivins and her friend. The humanizing reminiscences of their many meals ...

This is a series of tributes to Molly Ivins, a writer of passion and principle ... in New York for LGBT issues. Throughout the meal, we would each move around to different tables.

(Even Farrah Fawcett, a Texas icon who was the antithesis of Molly, had to make her own set of concessions to the place.) Ivins went at the state’s, and then the country’s, biggest guns armed ...