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Granny loooooooved Lawrence Welk. I remember when we visited when I was little, being all washed up on bath night (after Disney, obvs) and coming out into the TV room in my jammies to watch it with her. I’ll never forget the closing theme… 

“Good night, sleep tight and pleasant dreams to you / Here’s a wish, and a prayer that every dream comes true / And now, til we meet again…. Adios, au revoir, auf wiedersehn… GOOD NIGHT!”

Joan Blair (née Haggith) [1926 - 2013], taken in 1943 in London, when she was in the Women’s Land Army. #gramstagram #rip #heroine

My grandmother passed peacefully this morning just before 8 am.

This Mother’s Day, we celebrate our matriarch… the lioness of our pride.

RIP Joan Maud Haggith Blair

My hotel was around the corner from the waterfront memorial walk, so I got to see my fave uncle again. #rip (at Seawall)

RIP, The Man They Called Reveen. #NEVA4GET

Lest we forget, Siskel was a regular at the Playboy Mansion back in the day. I think he’s got the welcome party covered.

Below is from the original show. Look at these two motherfuckers about to change the landscape of film criticism forever.

ericmortensen:

Roger Ebert:

Wednesday, July 18, [2012] is the 20th anniversary of our marriage. How can I begin to tell you about Chaz? She fills my horizon, she is the great fact of my life, she has my love, she saved me from the fate of living out my life alone, which is where I seemed to be heading. If my cancer had come, and it would have, and Chaz had not been there with me, I can imagine a descent into lonely decrepitude. I was very sick. I might have vegetated in hopelessness. This woman never lost her love, and when it was necessary she forced me to want to live. She was always there believing I could do it, and her love was like a wind forcing me back from the grave.

This is what I was referring to when I said it was maybe the most romantic thing I’ve ever read (thanks, OP Eric - Tumblr was being persnickety about letting me reblog myself). I can only imagine how incredible his love letters to her must have been.

newspeedwayboogie:

“At this point in my life in addition to writing about movies, I may write about what it’s like to cope with health challenges and the limitations they can force upon you. It really stinks that the cancer has returned and that I have spent too many days in the hospital. So on bad days I may write about the vulnerability that accompanies illness. On good days, I may wax ecstatic about a movie so good it transports me beyond illness.”

I love the Van Gogh quote that Ebert used to close the Salon piece I just linked, entitled “I Do Not Fear Death”:

“Looking at the stars always makes me dream, as simply as I dream over the black dots representing towns and villages on a map.

Why, I ask myself, shouldn’t the shining dots of the sky be as accessible as the black dots on the map of France? Just as we take a train to get to Tarascon or Rouen, we take death to reach a star. We cannot get to a star while we are alive any more than we can take the train when we are dead. So to me it seems possible that cholera, tuberculosis and cancer are the celestial means of locomotion. Just as steamboats, buses and railways are the terrestrial means.

To die quietly of old age would be to go there on foot.”

Have a safe trip, Roger. 

(Source: vastandgrand)

bbook:

Legendary Film Critic Roger Ebert Has Passed Away

Speaking of love, the post he wrote on his 20th anniversary might be the most romantic thing I’ve ever read. To have loved like Roger & Chaz Ebert would be a pretty beautiful thing in one’s life.

RIP to a man I admired on so many levels. He made us understand ourselves better through film criticism, and we were only just beginning to know the depths of his gifts as a writer and humanist.

peterfeld:

An unforgettable description of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, which killed 146 garment workers 102 years ago today, mostly young women, led the New York Times Magazine’s “The Lives They Lived” issue on December 30, 2001. Three months after 9/11, this essay by Elizabeth McCracken memorialized Rose Freedman, the last survivor of the fire, who had died at 107 earlier in the year.

Surely some of the early jumpers believed they were saving themselves: they flung their bodies into blankets and jackets held taut by strangers, into fire safety nets once the fire department arrived, which ripped in half and flung their contents to the ground. Some women died trying to leap into the arms of firemen, who stood at the tops of ladders that, fully extended, reached only to the sixth floor.

People on the ground begged women not to jump. They begged as one woman waved a white handkerchief and then leapt; her flaming dress caught on a wire and she hung there till she burned free. They begged as a man helped a series of women off the ledge with courtesy, as if the air itself was an elevator car, before he kissed the last, let her fall and followed.

I do not want to die in a fire. I do not want to die so far from the earth. I am dying, and I believe I can fly.

Perhaps these women realized they could not save their lives. They knew that those who stayed inside the building would be incinerated beyond recognition. They may have thought that it would be a comfort to their families to have something to identify and then bury.

My stepsister told me about this during our first visit to New York in the ’90s, and accounts like this one were so moving, we went to find it (it’s now the Brown Building on the NYU campus) and pay our respects.

Today would have been my mother’s 68th birthday. 

Happy birthday, mummy! I love you!

I mean… at least he wasn’t Gargamel, right?