"We’ve seen many people through the end of life. It’s never dramatic, like Snagglepuss..."

"... staggering around onstage clutching his throat. It can be rough, and then one slips over gently to whatever awaits. My old pastor told me it is like going to bed on the living room floor and waking up in your own bed."

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,
He hath awaken'd from the dream of life;
'Tis we, who lost in stormy visions, keep
With phantoms an unprofitable strife....

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:

ADDED: Maybe Snagglepuss is an up-to-date reference. I see that he was reenvisioned in 2018 by DC Comics as a gay playwright in "The Snagglepuss Chronicles: The Need to Enter Stage Right":

When Vladimir Putin found his threel on Blueberry Heel...

... it was pretty surreal...



... and Goldie Hawn loved it.

Via Bloggingheads. That was uploaded to YouTube in 2010. Some fundraiser. When? I don't know. Maybe you can figure it out from the shiny happy faces of the various Hollywoodland creatures.

The camera fixes on Kevin Costner, chewing gum and head-bobbing, so... along with the centrality of Goldie, I'd guess 1996. But Putin didn't become president of Russia until 2000, so I'll say 2000.

By the way, do you know what singer put out the first recorded version of "Blueberry Hill"? It wasn't Fats Domino, whose hit came out in 1956. The original version is from 1940.

Kevin Costner vs. a sculptor who devoted 9 years of her life to making 17 larger-than-life bronze bison/horses/Indians for him.

It's a contracts dispute:

Mr. Costner promised to either build the [$100 million luxury] resort by 2010, place the sculpture in a mutually agreeable location elsewhere, or sell the multimillion-dollar work and split the profit....

Mr. Costner's lawyers argued in court that he met the terms of the 2000 agreement by displaying the work at a $6 million visitor center on part of the land intended for the resort....

To meet Mr. Costner's tight budget, [Peggy Detmers] agreed to do the work for $250,000, one-fourth of what she calls her "wholesale" rate. Mr. Costner confirmed in his testimony that he promised to market copies of the works aggressively in a gallery at the resort....

She worked for $27,000 a year. Obviously, she expected a bigger boost from the project that fizzled. To be fair, Costner's career fizzled too. He was flying high after "Dances With Wolves" — which was what the luxury resort was supposed to be about.