It’s one of those years. Nearing the end of March, and already we’ve had to say goodbye to Kate McGarrigle, Mark Linkous, Vic Chesnutt, and now Alex Chilton (and don’t get me started on the Oscars forgetting to mention Bea Arthur). But I’m not here to eulogize – there are far better folks at that than me (Paul Westerberg, for one). Instead, I’d rather celebrate a song that’s meant a great deal to me for a long while, and one of the first things I ever learned how to play on the guitar. (A love song so perfect that it even made its way on WP’s …A Given EP, recorded for the wedding of our dear friends Kevin and Gordon – and that’s just the way I’d like to remember a great songwriter now passed).
My guess is that the Oscars didn’t mention Bea Arthur because almost all of the work she’s famous for was on television and live theatre. She appeared in I think 3 or 4 films her whole career but for that wasn’t what she was best known for.
I’ll give you that – most of her work was indeed on stage and on television. But it’s Bea Arthur! (And it’s not as though they did a good job through the rest of the tributes either, lest we forget their forgetting altogether of Farrah Fawcett and the placement of a photograph of Jennifer Jones in tribute to Jean Simmons!)