Listen to this passage from Carrie Fisher‘s one-woman show Wishful Drinking, a riff about how a fairly good friend of hers, a gay Republican lobbyist named R. Gregory Stevens, died in her bed in ’05. It’s great stuff. Waking up with a corpse.
Once you’ve done that (or while you’re doing it), consider her wit and laughter and the extremely sad fact that the shit year of 2016 had one more card up its sleeve, it turns out, and it dealt it off the bottom of the deck at 8:55 am this morning: Fisher herself is now dead.
I’m as stunned and saddened as the next person. I thought she might be out of the woods. That “stable condition” tweet that her mom, Debbie Reynolds, shared yesterday seemed to indicate that.
I don’t know anything about heart conditions and heart specialists, but you have to presume there was some reason that the word “stable” was passed along by some medical authority.
12:50 pm update: I’ve just been told that if a person stops breathing and has no pulse for more than eight minutes, they’re history. Even among those who are revived within the eight-minute limit, over 90% don’t make it. It reportedly took paramedics 15 minutes to get Fisher’s pulse going after her plane landed.
Fisher was a good actress/performer but a much better author and screenwriter, and generally a brilliant wit and raconteur. Her best works were the book and screenplay of Postcards from the Edge and her autobiographical one-woman play and its nonfiction book, Wishful Drinking.
From publicist Simon Halls: “It is with a very deep sadness that Billie Lourd confirms that her beloved mother Carrie Fisher passed away at 8:55 this morning. She was loved by the world and she will be missed profoundly. Our entire family thanks you for your thoughts and prayers.”
Earlier: The finality began when Fisher suffered a serious heart attack on a London-to-Los Angeles flight three days ago (i.e., Friday, 12.23). She reportedly wasn’t breathing for a long period. It didn’t look good — hell, it looked bad. Then came a word of hope yesterday. And now this.
It was Fisher, remember, who asked the question in an Interview piece that indicated Daisy Ridley didn’t know who Cary Grant was, or didn’t know much.
I was at a party somewhere in the hills about ten or twelve years ago, and at one point I had a chat with Bill Maher and his girlfriend-of-the-moment. Quite the festive event, lots of crazy giggling and inebriation. And then I saw Carrie Fisher arrive and said to myself, “Oh, wow…all the party people are here.”
This is a very significant (i.e., chilling) boomer death, and obviously a heavy one for the ComicCon crowd. I feel very, very sorry for everyone close to Carrie — her daughter, mom, brother, all the friends and colleagues, Bright Lights co-directors Alexis Bloom and Fisher Stevens, etc. Sad day.
