By Staff
Many articles ago in this column, I published a list of people I would like to invite for tea on my front porch – in warm weather, of course!
Sadly, I omitted Kate Smith. Now there was a woman! When I was a kid, cutting my teeth on decent TV programs, Kate Smith had a weekly musical program aptly titled, "The Kate Smith Show."
Ms. Smith popularized the alternate national anthem, "God Bless America." Before I was 10 years old, I knew all the words to that song.
Kate Smith's theme song was, "When the Moon Comes Over the Mountain." I can still hear her gusty contralto voice singing that song!
Kate Smith was a lady, through and through. Her stage presence was elegant, regal and gracious. Wearing a floor-length gown with full-length sleeves, she glided onto the stage and sang her lungs out!
No cleavage. No suggestive words or movements. Just pure music! I don't recall when she died – she simply faded into the obscure pages of newsprint.
Many years later I remember reading a short article that the long, on-going court battle over where her body was to be buried was settled and she was "laid to rest" in upstate New York. That was it – short and simple.
And now another Smith is much in the news. This one I would never invite for tea on my front porch!
Poor Anna Nicole. Shortly after her death, NPR played a sound bite of her saying how difficult it was to be herself.
It was expensive to buy makeup, clothes and hairstyles to maintain her image.
I don't mean to be disrespectful, but the media hype is too much for me.
Here was a woman, often labeled a "gold digger," who married money and posed for Playboy magazine.
Her claim to fame was the court battle over her deceased husband's fortune, the size of her bust and later where her remains were to be interred.
So we were assaulted by media reporting about the pink rhinestone-studded pall covering her casket, what was placed beside her in the coffin, the banks of pink roses and the flock of white doves released into the azure skies over the Bahaman gravesite.
All these glitzy details were emphasized while scores of American troops and hundreds of Iraqi civilians were slaughtered on the other side of the world, not to mention six athletes who died when a bus careened off an overpass and thousands of people, including children, who died of disease, hunger, murder and "natural causes."
What's wrong with this picture? What makes one person's death more important than another's? A preference for pink? Money? Cheap fame? Or is this a sad commentary of where and how our minds wander for entertainment?
Both Ms. Smiths were pubic figures. One had talent; the other had notoriety. One was a genteel presence on stage; the other an assault on decorum. One was a diamond; the other cut glass. Perhaps we have lost our sense of true beauty and replaced it with faux glamour.
Well, there you have it – my bias is hanging out all over. It's my opinion, and I own it and take responsibility for it. The people I love and respect don't need glitz or glamour, or pink, or doves or rhinestones. They are diamonds. Real gems. And when they and I pass from this life, there will be genuine grief expressed, not in the sensational media, but in the hearts and minds of those who cared and loved them and me.
Kate Smith sings in my mind's ear, forever! "When the Moon Comes Over the Mountain," I'll be there! No pink. No rhinestones. No doves. Just the love of those who will remember.