Writes Anne Lamott, in "Age is giving me the two best gifts: Softness and illumination" (WaPo).
The pastor's remark calls to mind Percy Shelley's "Adonais: An Elegy on the Death of John Keats":
Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep,As for Snagglepuss... I'm old enough to get the reference, and I thought it would be easy to find a YouTube clip of the ham-actor lion on stage overdoing a death scene. I began to suspect that YouTube was censoring death. I don't know. I did find this collection of bad actors dying:
He hath awaken'd from the dream of life;
'Tis we, who lost in stormy visions, keep
With phantoms an unprofitable strife....
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The screen death I remember is Marlon Brando's Fletcher Christian. It seemed true to what a violent injury would do to a human.
Did Snagglepuss ever pretend to die? "Exit Stage Left" ... the point is that he escapes. This time I recognized the Lamott name, though, so I wasn't surprised to read that she'd misrepresented something.
I think if someone else had written the phrase “bad actors dying”, you would analyze it.
I was wondering — for the first time — why doesn't Snagglepuss have a mane? Is Snagglepuss a transgender male? A little research answers the question: Snagglepuss is a mountain lion. No manes.
There is privilege in seeing someone through the doors at the end of their life. I held my brother's hand as he left and still can hear the death rattle in his breathing. (What I also learned from that day before he passed: bed sores can materialize really fast!)
"Exit. Stage left."
Bad acting in death scenes, and they leave out this one?
Samurai Cop
Age is supposed to grow wisdom. Wisdom is acquired through being proven wrong at times, and other times being validated. Through that process, you are supposed to come to the truth we know little, and accept that your tiny little world, is as it is supposed to be.
That is acceptance, and then serenity.
There are some over achievers among the cherry trees in Central Park. They're already festooned with small white buds. Pretty soon they'll be gorgeous blossoms. Then, I guess, they'll be cherries or maybe leaves. I'm not knowledgeable about botany. Some of the leaves will be vibrant and green and some will be eaten by caterpillars. Then they turn colors in the fall. Some fall leaves are also very pretty. Then they fall. Then, after a while, they're nothing, not even mulch.....I suppose if cherry blossoms had consciousness they could celebrate their beauty or mourn the untimely passing of some of their own, but they don't. In any event, for all of us, nada wins in the end.
Fred Sanford clutching his chest:
"Hear that, Elizabeth? I coming to join ya!"
The bad actors dying badly was pretty grim AM viewing, not for the put-on "deaths", but for the reminder of just how abysmal A-budget film can be.
As a consumer of HB cartoons in the early 60's, Snagglepuss was a cartoon you had to sit through to get to a good one like Yogi, Super Snooper or Pixie and Dixie.
The alltime worst was Yakky Doodle. I used to root for the wolf to catch him, kill him and put us out of our misery.
Snagglepuss??? Heavens to Murgatroyd!
Actually I don’t personally remember the character, and perhaps he came along after I had stopped watching Hanna Barbera cartoons on Saturday mornings. But the catchphrase “Heavens to Murgatroyd!” was popular back when I was in high school.
With my recent brush with cancer, I faced not death but pre-death or Life as Schrodinger's Cat, as one might say. From January 4 to January 30th it was the case that I might have a fatal cancer or on January 30th the miracles of modern science aka surgery at Froedert Hospital might save me. It came out Miracles of Modern Science 1, Death 0. But as I crouched in my Black Box of the Unknown but Existing Reality, I was calm. I had no mental staggers. It just seemed that I was a part of organic nature, failing like any plant or animal. What can you do? And also I was a Roman Catholic Christian; I had done my best or at least I was still trying and, ... so ..., oh, it'll be OK. As I thought, I really seriously wondered for the first time why the Creator bothered with me. "When I see the heavens the work of Your Hands the moon and the stars which You have made, what is man that You are mindful of him?" Yet I also felt that He had been with on a long, tough walk through life and wouldn't fail me at the end. "Tis Grace that brought me safe thus far/ and Grace will lead me home."
I found a Snagglepuss "death" scene, in which he "dies" about 5:30 into the video.
Snagglepuss dies even
I’ve got enough going wrong with the system of systems of systems that is my body that I’ll know soon enough. I’m not in any discomfort and have a lot to live for (especially the world’s handsomest and smartest grandson plus the world’s loveliest and smartest granddaughter) so I am not eager for the “transition.”
Just about anything that happened in the last 30 years can be found on the internet. But before that? I've looked for tv commercials that I had seen many times, and bupkis ("Bupkis means a lot of nothing/And that's what I get from you." I went to YouTube to see if that was Sandy Becker or Soupy Sales and got, not really a surprise, bupkis).
Give me Droopie Dog over most HB cartoons characters, every time. And when Loony Tune characters died, they often became ghostly spirits drifting upwards with wings and a halo.
Laurence Olivier dying as Richard III.
A couple of minutes of classic Snagglepuss.
"("Bupkis means a lot of nothing/And that's what I get from you." I went to YouTube to see if that was Sandy Becker or Soupy Sales and got, not really a surprise, bupkis)."
It was the Dum-Dums on the Dick Van Dyke Show.
No, she's wrong. My brother's last coherent words were "don't stop the dialysis." He fought and had to be restrained. The moment before he died, he shot straight up in bed and screamed.
The hospice nurse said this was more common than people realize. Really wish they put that in the pamphlet.
But I was so proud of him for raging against the dying light, as he did most of his life. There was a hero.
Hey, good for you and best wishes, Wildswan.
Swans can get pretty wild.
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