In addition to the passings of Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett, this week also saw the deaths of two other celebrities, albeit lesser ones, but still, it seems that this week has been a fairly noteworthy one in celebrity passings. Ed McMahon, Johnny Carson sidekick for as many years as anyone could remember, died this week at age 86 after a period of declining health. If you grew up on "The Tonight Show", you knew how Carson and McMahon fit together like a hand in a glove. They were the perfect duo and it was the end of an era when Johnny signed off for the last time, turning his show over to Jay Leno, who has now passed the baton on to Conan O'Brien. Gone are the sidekick days. Now, hosts just come on by themselves and do the show as a solo act instead of having a straight man to play jokes off of like they used to. It's a different era now, and Ed and Johnny were late night fixtures of an older crowd that went to bed early and watched "The Tonight Show" in bed with a tiny TV usually perched on a dresser or vanity or on a small TV stand at the foot of the bed. Well, it's a different era now, and we all enjoyed that rare camaraderie of Ed and Johnny night after night. Years ago, in fact, the neighbor of mine who used to live across the hall from me got this wacky idea that we should host an "Ed McMahon Birthday Party" to celebrate Ed's birthday. He called Ed's publicist and got a lovely PR package from Ed's agency, full of nice photos, which my neighbor photocopied tons of and pasted them up on all the walls in our hallway and in his apartment. The party was.....unforgettable. My neighbor's roommate was a med student and all of his fellow med students were invited, along with my neighbor's friends and who knows who else, but we somehow crammed at least 200+ people into these two tiny apartments on a damp March night and I still have one small souvenir from that party hanging on my bathroom wall to commemorate that amazing night. It took the entire next day to clean up the damage from the party - lots of mud, beer and munchies ground into carpets that made a total complete mess and took forever to repair and clean. I can laugh about it now, but it was a nightmare to clean up our entire upstairs of this house before the landlord could find out how bad a mess was created by the party!
Now I have heard that Billy Mays, a semi-famous pitchman on commercials for various products, was found unresponsive today and died at age 50 in his Florida home. Cause of death is unknown, but still....what a week for celeb deaths! As they say, when it rains, it pours! Mays was apparently on a flight that experienced a blown tire and a rough landing in Tampa a day or two ago and was apparently hit on the head hard by falling luggage, so this may have contributed to his death, but not until an autopsy can be done will we know for sure what happened. Mays and Jackson were only 50, younger than me, so I feel bad when I hear that folks around my age are kicking the bucket, buying the farm, going belly up, dancing the last dance, checking out, cashing in, running down the curtain, pushing daisies and generally shuffling off this mortal coil, to quote a few terms used in my late cousin Terry's final blog post, "The Final Thump", on his now well known blog "Thumping My Melon". It just doesn't seem right when people younger than me die like that, and I guess I am beginning to see that one of the effects of growing older is watching people pass away who are in your approximate age group or thereabouts. I mean, someone like Ed McMahon, in his mid-80's, well, it comes as no big surprise when someone that age passes away. They've lived a full life, retired and spent time enjoying whatever retirement brings them. But someone around my age group is in their prime of life and still has a lot to give the world. You don't expect people in their 50's to die - that's just too young anymore, with lifespans increasing every decade. But it seems to happen more and more, as evidenced when I read the obituaries daily in the newspapers. I see more and more people my age and younger dying and it makes me wonder if our generation is ill fated to die younger than our parents generation. Maybe we've lived our lives too pampered and soft. Maybe we're just too fat, too lazy and had things too easily to where we never really had to work hard for anything like our parents did. I don't know. All I know is that I intend to stay around a good long time and defy those odds! Boomers, you who seem bent on maintaining perpetual youth, get up off your butts, turn off the TV (and not with the remote, but walk over and manually turn the thing off), get your sneakers on and at least go out and take a good brisk walk, 20 minutes, daily. Trust me, your body will thank you for it! Go on, turn off your computer and get out there! Now! Y' hear me? NOW!
5 comments:
I think that Conan has a sidekick in the form of Andy Richter, no? And Letterman has Paul Schaffer.
Not all people who die young do so because they are fat or lazy. Come on, Sally - have a little sensitivity here!
No, but a shocking number of Americans are obese and are dying at proportionally younger ages as a result. Childhood obesity is on the rise, as are cases of diabetes at younger and younger ages.
So while people don't necessarily die young strictly as a result of being fat or lazy, a lot of the diseases that Americans suffer from in far higher proportions than their counterparts in other industrialized nations are due to our highly processed, high fructose corn syrup laden diets.
You yourself are critical of the American way of driving everywhere and noshing on too much unhealthy food, so I'm not necessarily being insensitive here, just quoting fact. The American diet is leading us down a very unhealthy path and that is, in turn, leading to our skyrocketing health care costs. Eventually, something's gotta give!
I know what you're talking about, but ending your blog like that after mentioning people like Terry, and the other celebs who died, just gave the wrong impression, and made your tone one of entitlement.
I agree that Americans do need to be more physical. It's a shame the way that communities are built to force people to drive long distances for conveniences, for starters.
I only mentioned Terry because I quoted some of the ways he used to express dying, and it wasn't meant to imply that he died young because of any faults on his part. His cancer had a totally unknown cause and was in no way the result of any lifestyle choices he made. It just happened. No one knows why, but it did. Period.
I'm not at all trying to imply any sense of entitlement and I don't know where you're getting that impression. I am just expressing a lot of puzzlement over why, when I read the obits daily, so many folks my age and younger are filling the pages more and more each day. Why is our generation dying off so young like that? More and more each day, 40 and 50 years olds are in the obits. There are the usual spate of 70, 80 and 90 year olds as one would expect, but those are rapidly being replaced by middle aged people my age or younger. My question is - why?
Our diet? Our American lifestyle? What's behind this rapid demise of younger and younger people? That is what I am trying to say in this blog. Technology has made it possible to stay home and sit in front of big screen home theatre systems with 200+ channels and I see everyday at work how our library patrons check out armloads of DVD's, implying that they are spending far too much time in front of the boob tube instead of getting out and exercising.
I see too many obese children who will suffer a lifetime of illnesses related to their weight because they snack on pop, candy and junk food. All you have to do is to walk around and open your eyes to what's going on around here and you start wondering what we're headed for in the way of health problems as a society. Already, statistics have born out that 10% of the people use 73% of the medical resources in this country. Who are those 10%, anyway? The elderly? Yes, some. People suffering from obesity related illnesses? Yes, some of them, too.
Studying health care statistics gives you an alarming picture of where our country is headed and what's going on with our highly processed, corn based diet. It's fattening our country and we have the highest rate of obesity in the industrialized world. In order to overhaul health care in this country, we are going to have to also overhaul not only our medical system, but entire national mentality. There will need to be legal overhauls, food overhauls and redesigning of our cityscapes to make them far more pedestrian friendly.
So it's not going to come easy. In the meantime, people are getting fatter in this country and it's placing a massive burden on our already broken health care system. Like I said, something's gotta give, and SOON!
FYI, I took a long hike last night, in my very beat up 16 year old Birkenstock sandals, through a new section of the Portage Bike & Hike trail that links up with the Summit Bike & Hike Trail.
I went right to the border of the Portage and Summit trails where they meet up, meaning if I would have kept going, I would have ended up in Munroe Falls. As it is, I got pretty far and of course, had to turn around and walk all the way back. I haven't a clue as to how many miles I walked, but my bad right Achilles tendon wasn't too happy about the whole affair when I got home!
Still, I got to see some breathtaking scenery along the way, seeing parts of the Cuyahoga River I'd never before gotten to see. And I was rewarded on the way back by getting to watch a Great Blue Heron fishing just south of downtown on the river!
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