If you were wondering why Linda Ronstadt doesn't live in Tucson these days, her interview with the Arizona Republic published over the weekend might shine some light on her decision to head to San Francisco...too much of a car culture (fair) and she didn't want her children influenced by the "kind of thinking" here:

"And they were coming home with some decidedly exotic attitudes. There was a lot of homophobic stuff that they would hear at school, which I found very, very offensive as we have lots of gay friends. They've been around openly homosexual people since they were born, and for them to come home and say 'That's so gay,' I was offended by that.

"And then one day, my son went to have a playdate with a little boy, about 8 years old, and he said, 'What church do you go to?' And we said, 'Well, we don't go to a church,' and he said, 'Well, you're gonna go to hell, then.' So I had to stop the car. I wasn't mean to the little boy, but I had to explain to him that my son was a fine person and that I didn't think there was anything wrong with him and that we didn't even believe in hell. And certainly he wasn't going there, even if we did, and that I didn't like that kind of talk.

"But it kept happening, so eventually I decided that (they needed to move). Safety is small groups of like-minded people, and the group was so small in Tucson. It was certainly there; I have wonderful friends there and I'm really glad that I went back because I got to pick up those friendships in a certain way that I wouldn't have if I hadn't lived there for 10 years. But I just didn't want my children to be influenced by that kind of thinking."

Also, Ronstadt's not a huge fan of the architecture downtown these days:

"I still like Tucson, I still like to come back and I love to see my friends. I love to go to Mexico, which is more like Tucson was when I liked it than Tucson is anymore ... I'm sad about the downtown. I'm glad that people are down there, but the buildings look like Stalinist Russia. They're so generic. They didn't seem to realize that Tucson in the old days had a distinctive architecture."

If you're interested in living in Ronstadt's amazing former Tucson home, it appears to still be for sale at the quite reasonable price of $1,650,000.