Thursday, September 04, 2014

Can We Talk? Joan Rivers Haters, Get Over it Already!

God this blog is becoming a montage of R.I.P. notices lately.

Joan Rivers would hate that. So I'm not going to do that to her, although I do wish it for her.
My heart goes out to her family, friends, and all who knew and loved her.
I didn't know Miss Rivers personally but have booked her, and we had many, many mutual colleagues and friends. (S.L., you did a fantastic job with her career. Kudos.) My heart goes out to them. It's painful enough for those of us who weren't the closest.

Some people resonate through their friends and colleagues, via their friends' and colleagues' warm words. Joan Rivers was one of those beloved people. Everyone who worked with her loved working with her, and I've never met anyone who didn't feel that way about her personally as well.

She hated the word "legend" but she was, in the best sense of the word, in which a legend is current as well as with a long-respected body of work.

There's so much I want to say about Miss Rivers, which I will when I collect my thoughts, because she defined the words "trailblazer"and "resilience", but for now, I want to address her haters:

Get a clue. (Actually, Miss Rivers would have said, "Get a F******g clue" and probably would have added a "shut up" as she did to her hecklers, so I went really easy on you.)

If you're offended by the thing she said to Splash Media about "Palestine" you're either grossly misinformed or weeks out of date. Miss Rivers addressed it personally weeks ago on her website. Either you didn't get that memo, or are determined to be nasty and hateful and don't care.

She was an 81 year-old woman caught off guard, ambushed by cameras, and she said "Palestine" when she was talking about "Hamas".

She addressed and explained this on her website soon after, but the media, loving a controversy, didn't report that part of the story.

She wrote her statement herself, from the heart, rather than having a publicist write it for her. It wasn't her style to have a publicist write something for her when, as a writer, she was perfectly capable.

One thing I know about Miss Rivers--and anyone who worked with her will concur--is that Miss Rivers didn't apologize or explain herself unless she sincerely meant it (much to the chagrin of the suits who often tried to get her to). She didn't believe in placating people.


I respect her for that.

Show up on time, know the material, hit your marks, do your best, and if it doesn't work out that night, the show goes on, so you do it again the next night. A total pro, that was always Miss Rivers' motto as a performer.

At the age of 81, she was booked through late November (that I know of--it could be more). The average age of her viewers was 22.5 .

I respect her for that, too. And much, much more, which I'll address in another post.
RR