[Magdalen] Joan Rivers, 81

[Jay Weigel]

There were a lot of things I didn't know about Joan Rivers that I found out
this past week. One was that she was a Phi Beta Kappa grad of Barnard with
a degree in English and anthropology. Another was about her volunteering;
not just writing checks, but actually doing the work. She personally
delivered meals to shut-ins, driving her own car, and stayed and talked
with them, which I'm sure they enjoyed. Also she was very active with
animal rescue and with suicide prevention hotlines. I had always heard she
was a very kind person in private life, and there are stories coming out
from people who knew her or worked for her or even just met her once or
twice that attest to that. Public and private personae are often very
different.


On Sun, Sep 7, 2014 at 9:08 AM, Scott Knitter <scottknitter at gmail.com>
wrote:

> On Fri, Sep 5, 2014 at 9:32 AM, Ann Markle <ann.markle at aya.yale.edu>
> wrote:
> > Interesting how she is loved and lionized.  I don't care for her, never
> > did, and especially not her plastic face, which she seemed to find
> pretty,
> > but I found unattractive to the point of scary (think the hockey mask in
> > "Halloween").  I honestly don't get it.  I know she was one of the
> > "breakthrough" female comedians, but there were others (like Phyllis
> Diller
> > and Carol Burnett) who were actually funny.  Obviously others' mileage
> > varies considerably from mine.
>
> I've often thought her hilarious, and I saw her live when I attended
> The Tonight Show in Burbank, California, when she guest-hosted (guests
> were Daniel J. Travanti of Hill Street Blues...cue the theme; Lee
> Greenwood to introduce his new song God Bless the USA; Garry Shandling
> as her "Ed McMahon"). Her jokes during commercial breaks were often
> funnier than when the tape was rolling (the show was done at 5:30 p.m.
> Pacific time and aired two hours later, at 11:30 Eastern/10:30
> Central, in those two time zones).
>
> I thought her longer face looked fine...unique, but fine, and very
> expressive. Obviously she didn't agree and chose to have the
> manufactured look in which she seemed not able to smile fully. "A
> visitor in her own face," as they say.
>
> There's a good documentary about her that shows both the glamorous and
> not-so-glamorous aspects of her life and career. I seem to remember
> that she produced it, or something...or was simply cooperative about
> the honest portrayal. For example, we get to see her without her
> makeup, in her early-morning grumpyness, donning sunglasses before
> paging through her schedule book ("I'd be blinded by all the white
> space!"). And trudging off to perform wherever they would hire her,
> like in a far-flung casino in the frozen tundra of northern Wisconsin.
> There we see her heckled by a man offended by her joke about Helen
> Keller--he said, "You wouldn't joke about her if you had a child who's
> deaf and blind like I do." She laid into him with a vulgar rant. I
> suppose she felt that would keep the show going rather than stopping
> to bring the house down and meekly apologize. (And surely the man
> should not have been surprised, even if hurt.) There are other
> comedians who might have handled it with more class or perhaps just
> quickly apologized and moved on, talking to the heckler individually
> later. But she turned the air blue, basically, and attacked him with
> much name-calling. That's the part of her personality I didn't love,
> along with the self-centeredness in general.
>
> --
> Scott R. Knitter
> Edgewater, Chicago, Illinois USA
>