Have a peaceful journey Paul...

Paul Newman died yesterday. The strange thing is that I never really watched his movies, so I don't think of him as a movie star so much as I think of him as a star who used his fame to help others. I love those kinds of stars.

So much of what Paul did in his later years (like Newman's Own dressings, etc.) was all about donating money, and not about HIM. I mean, how many female pop stars have to come out with their own perfume for god's sake? And how many of them donate any of the proceeds to charity - let alone all of the net profits? That's what Paul Newman did, and I really admire him for that. In reading articles about him I am finding out about even more worthwhile activities he was involved in that I never knew about.

Another thing I love about Paul is that we were sort of related. He is also in the chain that gives me only four degrees of separation from one of my heroes - JFK. Paul's wife Joanne Woodward is a distant cousin of mine(probably 4th?) - she had to write to my mom as a pen-pal when they were kids, and I say "had to" because her parents made her write to my mom while she was growing up in welfare homes in the 1940's with no family around. If you look at the photo of Paul and Joanne, I could easily be related to either one, but Joanne definitely has the chin that I also inherited ;) So the degrees of separation look something like this:

My distant cousin is Joanne Woodward who was married to Paul Newman who did a movie with Marilyn Monroe who had an affair with John F. Kennedy. Pretty weird huh?