The Angel of Death Strikes Again

Sometimes I get the willies.

Last Friday I was sitting here blogging away, and I happened to mention Beatrice Arthur, who played Maude on TV in the 1970s and later, Dorothy Zbornak on The Golden Girls in the 1980s and early '90s.

She died on Sunday.

Okay, she was 86. Still...

Folks, you are reading the words of the Angel of Death. That's me. I kill celebrities. I don't mean to do it, and as Garfield the Cat once said, I don't know how I does it, I jez' does it.

I have blogged on this subject before. Do a blog search on Eek, I Did It Again, and you will be taken to something I wrote back in the summer of 2006. I was driving on Interstate 90 between Spokane, Washington and Post Falls, Idaho on a standard booze run (the state liquor stores in Idaho have cheaper prices than those in Washington owing to fewer taxes), and I had the radio on in the car. I was listening to a program of popular songs from the World War II era. I began thinking about June Allyson, the petite little blonde movie star of the WWII period of whom they said she was the girl "every boy wanted to bring home to his family." I always thought my Aunt Jessie, my mother's sister, looked a little bit like June Allyson.

The next day I read her obituary in the newspaper. June Allyson's, that is, not my Aunt Jessie. My aunt had already died by then. But Aunt Jessie wasn't famous, just wonderful, so I can't be blamed for that.

You're not convinced. Ha, you're saying. Coincidence. Big deal.

As the French say, uh-uh. Search my blog again: It Ain't Over 'Til The Fat Guy Dies. How about him? Mitchell Rupe, on death row for murder, in Washington state. I haven't thought about this loser in years, not since reading a newspaper story in 1994 about how he had eaten himself off death row. He intentionally got himself so fat that his lawyer sold a Washington state judge the notion that hanging him would be cruel and inhuman punishment. He was so fat, you see, that hanging him might result in decapitation, which would be "cruel and inhuman." Great legal victory for Rupe.

But then I step in. I remember Rupe and his story one morning in 2006 while driving my car across Chula Vista, California ... an hour later I see his obituary in the paper.

This has happened over and over in my life. I'll start thinking about some famous person...and then I find out they quit breathing just about the same moment I was thinking about them.

My friend Diane thinks I have a form of extrasensory perception. I don't know. My own speculation has been that maybe the fillings in my teeth somehow enable me to pick up radio or television signals that go directly into my head, bypassing my ears. (This might explain my ability to recite lines from old reruns of The Andy Griffith Show endlessly.) TV Land broadcasts it; I pick up the signal somehow.

You think I'm crazy? Again, you think it's just coincidence, and that all of these old people are about to die anyway?

Check this out: Marilyn Chambers, the great porn star of the 1970s and former Ivory Soap girl, died on April 12 at age 56. She was a true classic, an American original. I'll never forget the afternoon some of my newspaper buddies and I crowded around the VCR in Vacaville, CA to share in the wonder of her Oscar-worthy performance in the classic '70s porno film Insatiable ("How lovely to have you back in London, my dear!") My journal records that on April 10 I was wondering whatever became of her. Two days later she was found dead in Los Angeles. And 56 ain't that old. I'm 53.

If you're in any way famous, you want to steer clear of me. I have the Evil Eye somehow when it comes to celebrities.

In light of this gruesome talent I seem to have, all of you Barack Obama fans out there ought to be grateful that I'm trying as hard as I can NOT to think about him. I haven't looked at a newspaper in nearly six months. That's why I go out to Dead-or-alive-info.org every couple of weeks or so, just to find out if anyone famous or once-famous has died lately.

By the way, has anyone seen Fess Parker around?