The Best of My Favorite Things Part 1 – In Memoriam
Welcome to a new year, everyone! May 2020 be all that we hope for!
I was thinking about the My Favorite Thing columns on my website over the Christmas break and I came to the realization that there are an awful lot of posts here. I started writing a post a month back in June 2006 which makes, according to my admittedly unreliable maths, for 163 posts. That’s an awful lot of opinions! And it’s highly likely that some of you have missed a few of those posts, especially if you’re new to my website.
So I thought I’d start a short series of my favorite My Favorite Things to tempt you back to check on some of these older columns and perhaps even explore further in the vast array of articles I’ve written here over the last 13.5 years!
I’ll give a brief intro to each piece and also the first paragraph or so plus a link to the column if you decide that you want to read the rest. All eazy-peazy!
As it’s January, I thought I’d start with three pieces I wrote about two actors and a musician I dearly loved and who sadly have now left us.
First up is a post from January 2014 lamenting Peter O’Toole’s death:
I was deeply saddened just before Christmas to hear that the wonderful actor Peter O’Toole had passed away in London at the age of 81. Actually given his hellraiser lifestyle and the fact that his health has been pretty shaky at least since the 1980s, I think he did pretty well to last so long. Definitely a victory of the spirit! Read more…
The next dearly departed post appeared in March 2016 and expresses my shock and sorrow when I heard of the death of David Bowie in January:
I, like so many people in the world, was terrifically saddened – and shocked – to hear of the death of creative dynamo David Bowie on 10th January this year (it was a bad week – Alan Rickman and Glenn Frey both died around the same time). I was getting together some dinner and I had the TV on in the background on our public station here in Australia, the ABC. At first, I thought I’d misheard when the newsreader announced Bowie’s death. Read more…
My last in memoriam post appeared only a couple of months later, in May of 2016, and commemorates the death of the fabulous Alan Rickman:
January was a very sad time in my house. A couple of my long-time heroes passed away. In March, I wrote a piece about David Bowie, and I promised then that I’d do another tribute piece about the marvelous English actor and director Alan Rickman who died around the same time. I first became aware of Alan Rickman when I lived in London in the mid 1980s. At that stage, he was a stalwart of the Royal Shakespeare Company who were doing repertory seasons at the Barbican Centre. Read more…
