Death of a Lady

This shows you just how out of touch I am with the real world. Seems the "Fruitcake Lady" passed away months ago and I didn't even know. A woman after my own heart. Keep Miss Puss clean, y'hear y'all?

95-year-old Marie Rudisill, known as "the fruitcake lady" on regular segments of Jay Leno's "The Tonight Show." She was indeed the aunt in Alabama who raised Capote, and the woman he wrote about in his famous story, "A Christmas Memory." After Rudisill was featured as a guest in December 2000 on Leno's show, demonstrating to the host and actor Mel Gibson how to make fruitcake, she was asked to appear in regular segments beginning in 2002 called "Ask the Fruitcake Lady."

It's with sadness that I report Rudisill died in Hudson, Fla, last November, just before the publication date of her latest book "Ask the Fruitcake Lady: Everything You Would Already Know If You Had Any Sense" (2006 Hyperion Press $14.95), which was released on Nov. 7. -- BY PHILIP POTEMPA, nwi.com