The Skip Diet

When I was sitting a few feet away from Skip Miller's coffin at Holy Cross, I kept thinking he was way too young to die. I decided later on that night, I was going to stop screwing around and actually go on a food program to keep from dying myself. I decided to call it the Skip Diet. I figured to stop making excuses, pay attention to my own diabetic behind and get with it. After all, I've been a diabetic for over 25 years, there's not much I don't know about what I should and should not do to get the glucose numbers down and keep them there. But I've been playing at it. I did stop salt altogether, dead stop, cold turkey the day I got the diagnosis. My zillionaire then friend Meschulum Rickless, Pia Zadora's then husband, decided he would send me to the Rice Clinic in North Carolina to cure me right away. So I went for two months and came back all sparkly and healthy. That only last two months before I got smashed up in the car crash and went to live at Cedars Sinai. You just can't do much in the way of exercise when they've slashed your back open three feet. So gradually I got fat again. But every once in a while I talk to somebody--like Bill Dern who had an amputation from diabetic complications, get the hell scared out of me and act ok for a minute or two. But this thing with Skip was something else. So in the last two weeks, I have stuck to the program --my Skip Diet. It's simple really. I can eat anything that is green, swims or flies. I figure I have had all the indulgence anybody ought to have ever had and then some. So for this birthday on the 29th of the month, I am going to celebrate having lost some weight and added some years to the life expectancy of Ruth Adkins Robinson.