I Will Dance at Your Funeral

by Lawrence Schubert

“The worms crawl in and the worms crawl out

The ones that crawl in are lean and thin

The ones that crawl out are fat and stout

Be merry my friends be merry…”

                                    -Traditional

People think that I am being perverse when I say that I enjoy funerals and despise weddings. I scoff at your nuptials, I tell friends, but I will dance at your funeral. This is neither perverse nor morbid. It is a plain fact that nothing incites depression more than other people’s happiness (and in-laws), and nothing is so uplifting as other people’s trials and tribulations.

   All loving couples contemplating marriage should elope. They would save their families vast expense and spare their friends a great deal of annoyance. But upon dying, I say cram the house and don’t spare the buffet.

  When I was a younger man, I lived for a spell with my grandparents. I found it quite amusing that my grandfather drank his morning coffee while perusing the obituaries. Now I do the exact same thing; with only one, small difference. My grandfather read the Newark Star Ledger: He was looking for news of people that he knew. I read the Los Angeles Times: I do not expect to see my friends or acquaintances eulogized therein. I am looking for news of people I have admired, or those I have never known.

   You will never read a complete report of a person’s life in any newspaper until that person is dead. Only in death will people finally give you a break. Or take long-deserved notice of you. Usually because they are so surprised to find out that you were not already deceased that they are seized with a momentary, involuntary spasm of goodwill and generosity.

  I have not thought of Art Linkletter, who died last week at age 97, often in my life. As a child I toured CBS Television City and the studio where he taped his long-running show “House Party,” the one that spawned his signature book, “Kids Say the Darndest Things.” I still don’t believe all those little shavers weren’t prompted when they came up with lines like “My mother does a little housework then reads the Racing Form the rest of the day,” or the boy who wanted to be an octopus so that he could hit bullies with his “testicles.” It was amusing how he was always prodding children to say something naughty, but by accident, so that it was cute. Amusing and a tad subversive, and America ate it up because it was the “Candid Camera” era, a kinder/gentler “gotcha” culture than today’s YouTube and reality TV horror shows.

   I remember Linkletter mostly for the “Merrie Melodies” send-up of his earlier show, “People Are Funny.” In the Daffy Duck/Bugs Bunny cartoon he is parodied as Art Lamplighter, and hosts a show called “People Are Phony.” I remember him also as the secondary butt of an early John Waters cinema provocation from 1970, “The Diane Linkletter Story,” starring Divine as his ill-fated daughter who jumped to her death from a 6^th floor window-a tragedy her father blamed on LSD. Linkletter sued to prevent the Waters’ film from being shown, which of course accorded it instant cult status.

   When I read his obituary, I discovered that Linkletter was quirkier and cooler than I ever gave him credit for. When he was in his 80s, someone asked him the secret of longevity. “You live between your ears,” he replied. “You can’t turn back the clock, but you can rewind it.” And after his daughter’s death, though he had initially embraced a wide-ranging anti-everything drug policy (he, like Elvis, became an advisor to Richard Nixon), he eventually modified his position and in 1972 announced he had concluded that marijuana was relatively harmless and that law-enforcement officials should spend their time concentrating on hard drugs. Four decades past, Linkletter took the same position that is about to be put to a vote in the upcoming California state elections. And he was a Republican.

   Less well known, but more frequently in my thoughts, was mathematician, writer and bon-vivant Martin Gardner, who also passed last week, he at age 95. Gardner was one of those quintessential American characters who brought his own unique perspective to whatever he touched. Mathematics and math puzzles were his lifetime forte, but he was also renowned for his “Annotated Alice in Wonderland,” not to mention more esoteric fare such as his “Annotated Casey at the Bat” and his 1998 continuation of L. Frank Baum’s Oz series, “Visitors From Oz.” If a mind like Gardner’s was a pool I would dive in and happily drown.

   And let us not forget Doris Eaton Travis, the “last Ziegfeld girl,” who died recently at age 106, making Gardner & Linkletter look like refugees from “Cocoon 3.” That we shall never see her like again is as much an understatement as saying that the old Penn Station in New York City was vastly superior to the current one.

  So, to recap: Kids say the darndest things, a pretty girl is like a melody, and the universe is made of numbers. It’s a wonderful life, death be not proud-but only when a life is concluded can it be measured and appreciated in its totality.

  Death touches everyone, marriage only the unlucky.

  Strike up the band. I will dance at your funeral. 

Doris Eaton Travis: the “last Ziegfeld Girl”

Postscript: Since this epistle was completed, death has claimed actor Dennis Hopper (age 74) and artist Louise Bourgeois (age 98). The former, like many contemporary actors, appears to have so fascinated himself that I find little to interest me, which is not to diminish his suffering or the loss felt by those who knew him better. The latter’s life speaks to the sustaining force of a creative mind. And lost in the shuffle between the easy rider and the spider woman was the cameraman’s cameraman William Fraker, dead at 86. Fraker began his career with “The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet” and went on to compile a resume that included “Rosemary’s Baby” and “American Hot Wax,” though he is best remembered for his “fasten your seatbelts” cinematography for the 1968 “Bullitt.” If that’s not proof of evolution, I don’t know what is.

   

Death marches on, but we do not celebrate death, only the dead.