Roseanne (and some Tom)

Christmas in Salt Lake City,  circa 1960. The teacher asks her one Jewish student to stand before the class and explain why she doesn’t believe in Jesus. “I would sing the little song about the dreidel,” recalled Rose­anne Barr in her 1989 best-seller My Life as a Woman. “I was the Designated Heathen.” The teacher told Barr to be grateful she didn’t live in a Communist country, where “dissent” wouldn’t be tolerated.

Thirty years later, when Barr sang a little song for the San Diego Padres, she found the treasuries of tolerance wanting. “Disgraceful!” snapped the leader of the Free World, as the brethren of Ameri­ca’s Fourth Estate exploded in si­multaneous orgastic rage.

“I don’t know what y’all wanted me to [do],” opined Barr at a press conference addressing l’affaire d’anthem. “Put my head in my hands and start screaming and run off? I’m not a quitter.” No, indeed. Whether she’s serenading an au­ditorium full of Mormon school­children or a stadium full of angry baseball fans, Roseanne Barr car­ries on to the bitter end. Because like it or not, Roseanne Barr has learned to thrive in the role of odd woman out.MORE from Penthouse