A Note on the Ongoing Fonda

3.30.26. A note on the ongoing Fonda

Because she does, right?

Jane Fonda’s weekend was a typical whirl. Friday, 3/27, she made news at a rally outside the Kennedy Center (my heartbreak is boundless over the Dark Ages invasion at the vaunted performing arts space and presidential memorial, where I spent innumerable days/evenings across my years in D.C.), warning of authoritarianism, championing the arts, keeping visible the newly-revived Hollywood activist Committee of the First Amendment. By Saturday, Fonda was in Minnesota, front and center at St. Paul’s flagship No Kings protest, with Springsteen, Bernie Sanders, and thousands in the streets — millions nationwide — raising their voices.

Oh, and a week or so earlier, pre-production was announced on a movie version of Virginia Evans’s 2024 bestselling book, The Correspondent, with Fonda to star. Gigs & gossip (is she feuding with Streisand over the Redford tribute at the Oscars?), glam & gritty. She gets up and does it again. Amen.

She’s 88. She’s been like this for decades.

“I’m so glad to be alive right now,” Fonda told Jen Psaki on MS Now, the day before the No Kings event. Fonda’s exhortation was rousing: Get in there! Make a difference! This is the moment!

I snapped the photo above as I finally embarked full-time on a book project I’d noodled with for years, now available as Fonda on Film: The Political Movies of Jane Fonda. I’d had no idea that she was about to set up shop in D.C. throughout the autumn of 2019, donning a blazing red coat and leading Fire Drill Fridays rallies on Capitol Hill and hosting Thursday night “teach-ins” on Facebook. Couldn’t be surprised, though. Of course that period became a chapter in my book. And of course she wrote her own book, the 2020 What Can I Do? My Path from Climate Despair to Action.

She will keep it up, and no need for this space to keep tabs. The headlines will keep finding her.

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