Saturday, July 24, 2010
Celebrities that Kill.
Below you will find small excerpts from two celebrity memoirs, both of which relay the sad details of a death and their involvement. Do you think you can name the two offending celebrities? Did they deserve the gas chamber?
NUMBER I
...I was in Westport, acting in a summer stock production. As I would be away for several weeks, it seemed a felicitous time to have our New York apartment thoroughly cleaned. They had taken the air conditioner out of my bedroom window, leaving a gaping hole which the maid covered with a turkish towel. To secure the towel, the maid had rested it on the casing which had held the air conditioner, and pinioned it with dumbbells with which I exercised. While the shutters were being cleaned, the dumbbells became dislodged, one falling into the room and the other out of the window through the opening. We live on the eighth floor, and our bedroom windows were directly over the canopy of a famous restaurant, Le Pavillon, out of which a man and his wife had just emerged. The man was standing outside the canopy, the dumbbell hit him, and he was dead on arrival at the hospital. I have put these facts down coldly because, even now, so many years later, the recollection is still so painful that I have to pretend to myself that I am talking about something that happened to somebody else.
NUMBER II
...(passenger) and I were driving up Broadway......a thoroughfare that is divided by a safety island. It was early Sunday afternoon, we were not on drugs or liquor, and an elderly man, without looking, stepped off the curb right in front of my car. His body flipped up and landed on the hood with his face pressed toward mine through the driver-side windshield. This image so horrified me that I have used it....... As I pulled over to the side of the road in shock, the man's body slid off the hood of my car to the street, leaving indentation marks that reminded me of the snow angels you made as a child by lying down in snow drifts and waving your arms. "He's okay," (the passenger mumbled in hope). "No he isn't," I said realistically as I heard his death rattle. A crowd gathered around the car and luckily, oh so luckily, a cop approached and said, "I saw it all happen and it wasn't your fault." What a miracle. I had long oily hair and was dressed in my usual thrift-shop-pimp-meets-hillbilly outfit.....I called my dad to get our insurance information and he was immediately nervous. "Is anybody hurt?" he asked. "Well, yes...the man died," I had to admit. "Oh my God!" I heard my poor father moan. "Now this!"
Have no idea who either is (and will admit to being terribly curious to find out!), but it seems to me that both are entirely without fault.
ReplyDeleteNumber two sounds like John Waters, mostly because of the greasy hair and the word "hillbilly," which I remember he uses in his writing a lot.
ReplyDeleteIt was early Sunday afternoon, we were not on drugs or liquor
ReplyDeleteI preface a lot of statements with that line.
1. Maureen O'Sullivan
ReplyDelete2.Mary Tyler Moore
The first one: Arlene Francis, right?
ReplyDeleteDamn, I'm dying to now the second one!
wow...
ReplyDeleteI don't know...but number two is a damned good writer.
First one is definitely Arlene Francis, second I really want to know!
ReplyDelete