Love the stories, and the new terms
. I take it a “Ron-duh” isn’t a female Ron, but rather someone who, against all sense, puts up with a Ron?
I knew a Ron-duh of the first water - I always felt very sorry for her, but simultaneously wanted to slap some sense into her. She’s a friend of my mother, who was attracted to Ronulans like a moth to the flame, often with absurdly bad results.
Physically, she looked and sounded exactly like Olive Oyl from the old Popeye cartoon, so I’ll call her “Olive”. The first in her long line of Ronulans was a sorry little gnome of a man I’ll name Amos. Physically, he was quite repulsive - ugly, hairy, porn 'stache (of course - this was in the '70s), with bad hygene. Yet he had the gift of the gab. Somehow, he was able to get women to go out with them (and later, we discovered, to get men and women to trust their money to him).
Well, we heard all about Amos from Olive. He was a recent immigrant from Israel. He had been a soldier in the special forces there, the Golani Division - a colonel no less. He was an entrepreneur, but also spiritual.
Yet when we actually met this paragon, he appeared more like a greasy little con man out of a bad movie. He literally had shifty, rat-like eyes, and the exaggerated patter of a born pathological liar.
Olive married this fellow and was instantly pregnant.
During the pregnancy, my mom had an - insight into Amos. My mom was into Jewish folk dancing in thiose days, and while attending a class she got to talking with another, younger woman - named “Amy”. Amy was yet another Ron-duh. She was very young - late teens - and she was gushing over meeting a fabulous older man, very mysterious, an ex-colonel in the Israeli army … you guessed it, it was Amos.
An ugly scene followed. Amos, confronted, stormed out of the house and disappeared. So did much of Olive’s money, and, as it later turned out, a lot of other peoples’. He’d been working a variety of financial scams, and he vanished before he could be arrested. Later, it turned out that everything he’d ever said was pretty well a lie. For example, he was not a colonel in the Israeli special forces - he was a deserter who never saw much more of the army than the brig. He had, as it turned out, a lengthy criminal career back in Israel, had left to avoid the authorities there, forged his way into Canada - and no doubt left to continue his “career” elsewhere.
This story has an odd sequel. Twenty years later, out of the blue, Olive gets a call from Israel from a young lady. Turns out it is a daughter of Amos, trying to track down all of her half-siblings (no idea how she did it, given his habits). She actually came to Toronto and turned out to be a lovely young lady, quite unlike her horrible father, who apparently was quite the evolutionary success - he had kids by gullible Ron-duhs all over the world. [Sadly, Olive’s son took after his dad, only without his father’s “gifts”]
…
On reflection, I’m not so sure Amos was a Ron - after all, he was a more or less successful con man. 