Gilda got married and went away. None of
us saw her anymore. There was one good thing: Laraine had a party one night, a
great party at her house. And I ended up being the disk jockey. She just had
forty-fives, and not that many, so you really had to work the music end of it.
There was a collection of like the funniest people in the world at this party.
Somehow Sam Kinison sticks in my brain. The whole Monty Python group was there,
most of us from the show, a lot of other funny people, and Gilda. Gilda showed
up and she’d already had cancer and gone into remission and then had it again, I
guess. Anyway she was slim. We hadn’t seen her in a long time. And she started
doing, “I’ve got to go,” and she was just going to leave, and I was like, “Going
to leave?” It felt like she was going to really leave forever.
So we started carrying her around, in a
way that we could only do with her. We carried her up and down the stairs,
around the house, repeatedly, for a long time, until I was exhausted. Then Danny
did it for a while. Then I did it again. We just kept carrying her; we did it in
teams. We kept carrying her around, but like upside down, every which way—over
your shoulder and under your arm, carrying her like luggage. And that went on
for more than an hour—maybe an hour and a half—just carrying her around and
saying, “She’s leaving! This could be it! Now come on, this could be the last
time we see her. Gilda’s leaving, and remember that she was very
sick—hello?”
We worked all aspects of it, but it
started with just, “She’s leaving, I don’t know if you’ve said good-bye to her.”
And we said good-bye to the same people ten, twenty times, you know.
And because these people were really
funny, every person we’d drag her up to would just do like five minutes on her,
with Gilda upside down in this sort of tortured position, which she absolutely
loved. She was laughing so hard we could have lost her right then and there.
It was just one of the best parties I’ve
ever been to in my life. I’ll always remember it. It was the last time I saw
her...
I miss this fine lady 🌹
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