The unparalleled performance art of Corrine Brown

The next time I will see Corrine Brown — whom I still call “Congresswoman” — will either be inside a federal courtroom or walking to a federal courtroom.

I won’t speak to her. She won’t speak to me. For days, for weeks of trials.

That’s one of the rules of her trial regarding One Door for Education, her charity that prosecutors say was a slush fund.

I’ve had conversations with Corrine Brown that run the gamut.

____

In Baker County during her last campaign, a reflective conversation in which Brown painted a picture of herself as an advocate for her district (whatever the lines happened to be at the moment) against all odds.

She was in Grandma Corrine mode at that point, stumping for votes among a few dozen MacClennyites who seemed to regard her as more of a curiosity than a candidate.

After a debate in Jacksonville, one that she didn’t exactly win, Brown distinguished herself in a presser, posing a question: “What if I said I thought you was a pedophile? You’d think something was wrong with me.”

Those words, voiced on the debate stage, recurred during a post debate presser.

“If I said ‘young man, you a pedophile’, that’s a charge; because somebody makes an accusation against you doesn’t make you guilty.”

But then I saw her in a courtroom. She turned around and apologized for berating me in the press conference. It was as if the spectacle had never happened.

Again, great theater. Every last bit of it.

_____

And it appears that Corrine Brown had to get one last show in before things get real.

On Wednesday in a scorching hot Hemming Park, Corrine Brown dispensed ice cream sandwiches from the mobile House of Honey Drippers.

Brown drew the media for the stunt (a “thank you,” as she told one television outlet).

The press saw her in a gregarious mood, and allowed her to present sympathetically for the television audience.

This was notable precisely because it was Brown’s last media hit — perhaps ever, but at least until her fate is decided by a jury of people who have no cultural knowledge of Jacksonville.

Corrine Brown is as Jacksonville as Maxwell House breezes: Jacksonville in all of its glorious contradictions — a woman who has been condemned by Democrats, and feted by pragmatic Republicans.

She did business — big league. She built a political machine so strong that it took Susie Wiles and a 24-count indictment to bring down. And as her trial will show, lots of people kissed the ring — and will have to admit it under subpoena.

___

With every passing news cycle, Brown becomes a more sympathetic figure. as time dampens the luridness of the original charges.

It doesn’t hurt her that Rep. Al Lawson, after seven months of knowing he was going to represent the district, and five months after a pro forma general election, still hasn’t figured out Jacksonville.

Politics is a business that doesn’t make sense to many on the outside: expect the witness list in the trial that begins later this month to reflect that, with loads of people from both parties almost guaranteed to testify.

Can Corrine Brown beat the rap?

It all comes down to reasonable doubt.

And the threshold for that appears to be growing wider — at least in the eyes of her lawyer — as the trial approaches.

If you ignore the sheer weight of the indictment, you almost might buy into that theory yourself.