Slightly Off the Mark

SLIGHTLY OFF THE MARK

            The other night my wife asked me to hand her a bottle of water. I reached for it and said, “When I blow a dollar on a bottle of water …”

            And then I stopped. I’d just learned of the death of Robin Williams, and that’s a line stolen from him. (It ends with, “I buy Perrier.”)

            “Reality … what a concept.”

            Celebrities are people, no matter how much we’re tempted to think otherwise. They often abuse their bodies with everything from drugs and booze to working too-long hours, all of which can make that dying thing come even sooner.

            “Cocaine is God’s way of saying you’re making too much money.”

            Lauren Bacall, a truly legendary actress, died the day after Williams. It’s not the first time the passing of one legend was overshadowed by the passing of another, partially because the height of Bacall’s career came much earlier. We can remember the first time we saw Robin Williams. For me, and many old enough to have been watching, it was a guest appearance on “Happy Days”, playing a very strange alien named Mork.

            “Never fight with an ugly person. They’ve got nothing to lose.”

            He was off and running.

            I last saw Robin Williams in one of the best new sitcoms of last year, “The Crazy Ones”. He was in the groove, and more surprisingly the rest of the cast kept up with him. It was the funniest new show I watched in 2013, but it went up against another good series, “The Michael J. Fox Show”, and they canceled each other out.