Attention must be paid

Been thinking a lot about death and dying recently.

Don’t know how soon it will be for me, but have lost quite a few dear friends and know some for whom it may be quite close.

Am harking back to 1982 working at the Sharon Playhouse, when I had been convinced by Clifton Reed to become the Press Rep, something I had never done before. Clif had done  press for the American Cancer Society in the MadMen Days, Clif having never smoked a cig in his life, although his lovely wife Jean, died of it.

Clif on the three martini lunch ­— the first is the one that rescues you from the morning, the second the one you really enjoy and the third giving you the strength to go back to work.

How did they do it?

Clif convinced me to do the Sharon job. Our first production? Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman.” Cannot tell you how many told us not to do the play.

DEATH in the title! Do you realize how many old people are here?

Miller lived right down the road.

We did it. People, lots of old, never underestimate old folks, came and loved it, as did Alvin Klein of the New York Times.

Miller never came.

Joe Madison, civil rights activist and radio host on Siri, is on a hunger strike which he won’t end until the John Lewis voting rights bill passes. Good luck, Joe. Hunger strikes.

The IRA, not what you have investments in, if you are lucky enough to have same, but the Irish Republican Army, had a hunger striker name of Bobby Sands who did succumb.

Joe Madison, who marched with Dr. King, said to his wife when she asked Are you really going to go this ‘till the end? A one word answer came: Yes.

Then he went further to Don Lemon on CNN. “I have five children, four grandchildren and one great grandchild and I never want them to think this sacrifice is too much.” Lemon told Madison that he was already thin enough. Madison quipped, “I don’t want to thin out our votes.” Even the threat of death cannot strip him of his wit.

Madison again. He said he had done 45 days alongside the fabled comedian Dick Gregory, so this was nothing new. Move over Mahatma Gandhi.

As an underager in 1961, I wandered into a club off Rush Street in Chicago and there was this thin Black man chain-smoking and spinnin’ yarns. Years later a man who claimed to rep Dick Gregory tried to interest me in writing jokes for Dick. “You’d just stand in the wings and when Dick comes off stage, you just give him notes.” What? Gregory now gone.

Dick Shawn, who sang “Springtime for Hitler and Germany” in Mel Brooks’ movie “The Producers”, as the character LSD Lorenzo San D’Angelo, and the funniest man I have ever been near, who died while performing, was known for his outrageousness (he washed his hair on stage in a play of mine at the Yale Rep, when no one knew he was going to do it), suddenly hit the floor and the college audience thought it was just Dick being Dick until his son in the balcony shouted, “It’s real!”

And Mort Sahl, the Godfather of all stand-ups. Another dead nonegenarian. (Shawn was listed as 56. A friend surmised, “That’s Hollywood 64.”)

I was doing a bit of a stand-up myself a few years back in Fargo, North Dakota — don’t ask — and I had a newspaper in hand, a la the great Sahl, who used to spin his yarns direct from the daily news, and I asked the audience of a hundred or so if they knew about Sahl. One man deep in age raised his hand. Sahl, without whom Maher, Noah, Sykes, Wong, Colbert, Silverman, et alia, would not exist.

Sahl who said, “Is there someone I haven’t offended?”

Death and dying. As Linda Loman says in “Salesman”, “Attention must be paid.”

Lonnie Carter is a writer who lives in Falls Village. Email him at lonniety@comcast.net., or go to his website at www.lonniecarter.com.