Who's next?

 

We had it all
Just like Bogie and Bacall
Starring in our old late, late show
Sailing away to Key Largo
-- Key Largo, Bertie Higgins, 1981

When one gets to my age, I suppose you have to expect to see obituaries for the entertainers you have enjoyed all of your life

But it sure seems like we’ve had more than our share this past month.

Now comes the obit for Lauren Bacall.

I’ll miss her presence on the planet. She brought me great joy.

Lauren Bacall died yesterday. She was born Betty Joan Perske on Sept. 16, 1924, and her friends still called her Betty. It was director Howard Hawks who gave her the name we all know her by.

If you don’t know about Lauren Bacall, you probably do know her most famous movie line. It’s from her first film, made when she was still a teenager, To Have and Have Not. She delivers the smoldering line on-screen to Humphrey Bogart: “You know how to whistle, don’t you, Steve? You just put your lips together and blow.”

My god, sex just seemed to ooze from that room. She married Bogart shortly after the movie was released.

Thanks heaven we still have her movies. If you haven’t seen To Have and Have Not -- or The Big Sleep or Key Largo -- make it a point to get ahold of a copy of one or all of them. You’ll see what I mean. She was a silver screen phenomenon.

Last month, Elaine Stritch died. She was another of my favorites. She was 89 and, up until recently, she was still performing. I’ve enjoyed her acting work -- both dramatic and comedic -- since I first saw her in 1960, starring in the CBS TV sitcom My Sister Eileen.

More recently, I’ve come to love her as a singer. She could interpret a song with the best of them, and she could belt out a big Broadway tune as few others could.

If you don’t know her work, get your hands on a DVD of her one-woman show,  Elaine Stritch at Liberty. It’s a one-woman performance in which she truthfully sums up her life and career -- and sings some of her better known Broadway show-stoppers. The show premiered in New York in 2001, and then she took it on the road to London, where it played at the Old Vic Theatre.

(Two friends and I were in London while the show was at the Old Vic. My friends were younger than I was and had never heard of Elaine Stritch. They opted to see Chicago, and they regret it to this day.)

It’s hard when people you’ve admired since you were young start to die off. It’s like losing a part of your life -- the part that was filled with larger-than-life figures with amazing talent.

I wonder who will be next.

This is one of the drawbacks of getting old.

Don’t misunderstand: I’m happy to be alive and healthy at 71.

Nevertheless, I miss the great stars who gave me such a lifetime of joy.

And it seems as though they’re dropping like flies.

Panthers, Spiders and ... Meercats?

There’s an old joke that goes like this.

Question: How many old-line  Richmonders does it take to change a light bulb?
Answer: Four. One to fetch the stepladder, one to hold it steady, one to mix the drinks, and another to discuss the cultural and social history of the old light bulb.

It seems it never ends. Now it’s all about the cultural and social history of the Douglas S. Freeman High School mascot, Rebel Man.

How many will it take to discuss that? Way more than four, it seems.

But they’re not just discussing it. It’s turning into a controversy, with a news story even turning up in the Washington Post and two op-eds published side-by-side in the Richmond Times-Dispatch. Shades of the Washington Redskins affair!

Speaking as a native Richmonder -- yes, some of us still survive -- I’d like this fairly trivial cultural problem to go away. Here’s an idea: Call ‘em The Douglas Freeman Meerkats.

There’s no direct connection between meerkats and the late Dr. Freeman (a revered Pulitzer Prize winning author and News Leader editor), although he would have, I suspect, admired some of their qualities.

Meerkats form families of about 50. They post sentries for protection. They work cooperatively. They’re industrious. And they’re cute. Just watch “Meerkat Manor” and you’ll see.

Meerkats are already in the news in Richmond this summer.  A handful of meerkat pups, all males, were born in June at the Metro Richmond Zoo. (See the zoo's live webcam here)

(Freeman students might be especially pleased to know that meerkat families are called “mobs.”)

So that’s my suggestion. If Freeman adopts the meerkat as a mascot, Richmond can move on to solve even bigger problems, like where to put a baseball stadium.

But keep in mind two things: My advice is worth exactly what you’re paying for it; and my high school mascot was a panther and my university mascot was a spider.