May 1, 1997

Widow of Reinvention

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Widow of Reinvention

For $100,000, she gave her two cents on American culture.

by Omar Beer

#20 Gail Zappa, 51, North Hollywood, Calif. Party: D. $292,650 total contributions.

View Zappa’s itemized contributions.

You’d think a dental floss tycoon would have a better chance of slurping java with the president than Frank Zappa’s widow. Yet there was Gail Zappa in August 1995, sipping with other donors from dainty china cups in the White House Map Room. The president and vice president each gripped sturdy mugs.

“I was trying to figure out how to hold the cup, not to make noise, not to break the china,” she says. She probably could have broken as many saucers as she wanted to. Five days earlier, the Democratic National Committee had recorded her $100,000 donation. She took the opportunity to push her idea for a Department of Culture to lift the American artistic sensibility, which, she said, is “slightly lower than yogurt.”

Previously, the best-known Zappa activism had been Frank’s battle with Tipper Gore over warning labels for music recordings. Whatever ill will lingered from those encounters, however, was outweighed by Gail Zappa’s antipathy for Bob Dole.

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From the desk of Mother Jones CEO, Monika Bauerlein...

Newsrooms can be funded in many ways. One of the most controversial (and volatile) ways is by a for-profit corporation or a billionaire owner. We see it across the headlines on a weekly basis: the claw backs in public media, the gutting of The Washington Post, the bending over backwards to appeal to Trump and his allies.

But not here.

When Mother Jones first started publishing 50 years ago, our founders made a critical decision: to be a reader-supported nonprofit. They knew that no corporate owner would be interested in a muckraking newsroom; they also knew that no muckraking newsroom would be interested in following the agenda of a corporate owner.

And so, we’ve been reader-funded for half a century. We rely on contributions from our readers—readers like you—whether it’s $50, or $15 a month, or whatever fits your budget. People give what they can, and every donation makes a difference for our newsroom, which has grown tremendously—in size and reach and renown—since its inception in 1976.

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Every donation Mother Jones receives from readers fortifies our newsroom, whether we’re covering underreported scandals out of Washington, DC, or the most important news of the day. And right now, each donation will be doubled because of our $50,000 match. So when you make a donation—$5, $50, any amount—it’ll go twice as far.

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