Jane Fonda has had many professions over the course of her 82 years. She’s been a model, a fitness guru, an activist, an actress—and, it turns out, a prolific blogger for the last decade-plus.
Since January 2009, Fonda has been consistently updating a blog on her personal website chronicling her experiences on film sets, how she spends her free time, and her various thoughts on white privilege, activism, the pandemic, and aging. She confessed in her first-ever post that “Blogging itself is a new adventure for me. You see, I have always been something of a luddite…Someone intensely resistant to technological advances,” confessing that she googled something for the first time in the summer of 2008 and didn’t even own a computer until she was 58 years old. A computer which Ted Turner, to whom she was married at the time, once threw across the room “when he thought it was taking me away from him.” But perhaps Turner’s real fear wasn’t laptop related, but rather that his wife was transforming into a rival media magnate right before his very eyes.
In her most recent post on Tuesday, titled “PINS AND NEEDLES,” Fonda discussed mailing in her ballot this week and her excitement over the record-breaking 22 million Americans who have already cast their ballots in the 2020 election. “My belief is that if Biden wins and is brave and bold (we have to make sure he will be), he can bring enough good jobs and pay proper attention to working people in the middle of the country who have been ignored and left behind by previous elected officials (of both parties),” she writes. “That may be a step forward in quieting the anger that’s been erupting in places where militias exist, ease the despair that fuels the opioid pandemic and begin to address the underlying causes of police violence.”
While the actress’s activist and political content is obviously her primary focus, it shares an equal amount of blog space with her regular updates on the squirrels in her backyard and the picnic table she recently purchased for them. In September 27’s post, “BUILD IT AND THEY WILL COME,” Fonda shares an image of this new piece of rodent-sized furniture which features a small pot full of nuts in the center. “It’s 12:30pm and I’ve already filled the little pot 3 times. Maybe there are a lot of squirrels and I just choose to think it’s one squirrel…my squirrel. A girl squirrel. But if that’s the case she’s on track to become a very plump squirrel,” she writes.
The actress then goes on to list her other recent purchases which include a hummingbird feeder and birdbath, tying it all back to her Fire Drill Fridays, a weekly demonstration she organized on Capitol Hill to demand political action to address climate change. She explains, “Because their lungs are so fragile, birds are early warning signals for the rest of us. ‘Canaries in the coal mine.’ So are the great white sharks that are suddenly appearing in the Bay area, far north of their normal range, because of warming ocean. How birds and fish are behaving as their environment changes is telling us something about the future: Global warming isn’t a faraway phenomenon in the global south or a somewhere- in-the-future crisis that will be a problem for our great-grandchildren. It’s right here. Right now.”
More Great Stories From Vanity Fair
— Monica Lewinsky on the Pandemic’s Forgotten F-Word
— Why Harry and Meghan Won’t Spend Christmas With the Queen
— What One Book Critic Learned by Reading 150 Trump Books
— How Ghislaine Maxwell Recruited Young Girls for Jeffrey Epstein
— More Details Emerge on Prince Harry and Prince William’s “Bitter Explosion”
— Tracing Photographer Richard Avedon’s Bohemian Coming of Age
— From the Archive: The Mysteries of Princess Diana’s Fatal Car Crash
— Not a subscriber? Join Vanity Fair to receive full access to VF.com and the complete online archive now.