Family’s tribute to ‘plus-sized Jewish lady redneck’ in NC newspaper delights internet
The parting tribute to an 84-year-old mother — who is lovingly described as a “plus-sized Jewish lady redneck” and whose online obituary applauds her love for ham, atheism and late-night bowling — has delighted the Internet as a yuletide swipe at death.
Renay Mandel Corren’s sprawling and irreverent life is memorialized in Wednesday’s Fayetteville Observer.
By Thursday morning, news of her Dec. 11 death had already traveled to England and lit up hundreds of Twitter posts, including an appreciative note from North Carolina Attorney General Josh Stein.
As an itinerant “Yankee Florida liberal Jewish Tough Gal,” Corren spent considerable and memorable time in Fayetteville, where her “disrespectful and totally non-denominational” memorial will be held in a yet-to-be-named bowling alley on May 10.
Cribbage champ and dater of Larry King?
As he penned his mother’s farewell, son Andy Corren listed Fayetteville among the towns where “Renay’s dreams, credit rating and marriage are all buried.”
She shunned cooking and cleaning, ate poorly without shame, bowled into the late hours, rose into the nation’s highest cribbage-playing ranks and may or may not have dated Larry King and come up with the name for Sunoco. Andy Corren notes his mother’s penchant for stretching the truth.
“Here’s what Renay was great at,” the obituary reads. “Dyeing her red roots, weekly manicures, dirty jokes, pier fishing, rolling joints and buying dirty magazines. She said she read them for the articles, but filthy free speech was really Renay’s thing. Hers was a bawdy, rowdy life lived large, broke and loud.”
She had managed to fend off both death and death-in-life for so long her family thought her immortal. She offered a middle finger to COVID-19, pneumonia, breast cancer, blood clots, bad feet, recession, bankruptcy, six kids, divorce and “marriage to a philandering Sergeant Major.”
“Renay has been toying with death for a decades,” her son explained, “but always beating it and running off in her silver Chevy Nova.”
Remembering to laugh
After losing her beloved daughter Cathy — who herself had lost both a fudge shop and an eye — she shared her final years with son Michael in El Paso, the Texas border town that provides her obituary’s dateline.
The family requests zero privacy, and requests that all appreciative readers squander government money on a one-armed bandit, at a blackjack table or on a cheap cruise.
“Please think of the brightly-frocked, frivolous, funny and smart Jewish redhead who is about to grift you, tell you a filthy joke,” the obit concludes, “and for Larry King’s sake: LAUGH.”