On the other hand, this is one hungry female. Weisberg is, for the moment, hunkered over the kitchen table, wolfing down a salad in a white spaghetti bib. So much for glamour. Between bites she scolds her mother, Libby Magness, who sits in the living room, blithely embarrassing Weisberg with proud-parent stories.
"You never had to tell Ruthie to practice the piano," Magness is saying. ''She was Miss Model Teen of the Northeast - I have her trophy here. . . .
She won a savings bond in the smile contest in Atlantic City; she's always had good dental care. . . .
"Now, these are Ruthie's crowns."
"Ohhhh," groans Weisberg, 33, who finishes eating and flops on the couch with a newspaper. "You don't want to show those."
Ignoring her, Magness displays the silver beauty-pageant crowns - and then inserts a gentle needle.
"One day I was down on my hands and knees. I was scrubbing the kitchen floor and I was a mess," she declares. "And I hear this voice on the radio: 'I'm Ruth Weisberg!'
"And I looked up at that radio and I said, 'Yeah. And I'm your mother.' "
Weisberg listens to her mother and smiles. She is, by many accounts, a remarkably unaffected young woman with quick wits and a robust affection for the loopy side of life.
"I like to think sometimes that God is laughing at me," she says.
''I imagine Him shaking His head and saying, 'Weisberg, what are you up to
now?' "
There have been moments.
Among other things, Weisberg has been a lip-syncing cheerleader, a Shadow Traffic announcer terrified of driving, the Jewish co-host of a Catholic priest's rock-and-roll show, and a woman who found love in a cemetery, marriage in a greenhouse and the officiating rabbi in a comedy club.
"That's my Ruthie," says Shirley Solofsky, a longtime pal from her Oxford Circle days. "She doesn't drink, she doesn't smoke, but Miss Goody Two-Shoes has a great time."
