Funny Cry Happy: Remembering Peter O'Sullivan for the Orlando Weekly's 20th Anniversary

No one who had had their picture taken with a martini glass full of cotton candy and a shaker full of booze, (meant to be poured over and the cotton candy), should have shed a tear within 24 hours of such a shot being taken.

And indeed, I was in my element: fresh off a plane on my first trip to Chicago to meet one of my favorite people, writer, editor and bon vivant Charles Martin.  
I was also exhausted from weeks of work and had one more story to write that night, but it was okay. Since Chas also works online, too, we’re perfect traveling buddies. We can go to cities around the world, work silently side by side for hours in hotel rooms and no one impatiently says “Let’s go, dammit, let’s go!” Work first, Shedd Aquarium and Lou Malnati’s pizza later. 


The one thing I had write that night was a piece for the Orlando Weekly’s 20th anniversary issue about the paper’s founding editor, Peter O’Sullivan (right), my mentor and father figure (I had a father, but go figure), who gave me my first real break at that paper in 1991. It was an intensely personal piece and despite all the cotton candy and plane rides I had to sniffle on the quiet so as not to alarm Chas, with whom I'd been having so much fun. It was fun to write about Peter, too, but sad because he's so very missed. There's a gift store in NYC called "Funny Cry Happy." That about sums up the evening.

The result was a story that meant the world to me personally, Writer Liz Langley Remembers the Weekly’s First Editor as Her Champion and Mentor. And I wouldn’t have written it had it not been for the advice of my friend, the editor who succeeded Peter, Jeff Truesdell, another friend and mentor without whom I’d be nothing. 

Chas even went over the piece for me and OWeekly editor Erin Sullivan did a great job with it - for a writer to get along this well with editors may feel like a mouse whooping it up with the cats, but oh well. Perhaps we’ll all end up on NatGeo’s Unlikely Animal Friends one day.

At any rate, this piece that I didn't think I could do turned out to be one of my favorite of all time, so I hope you'll take a look and enjoy it. It's funny-cry-happy. If that phrase doesn't deserve meme-hood I don't know what does.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Day at the Races

Image
       So - has anything especially fast, slow, theatrical, queeny, nostalgic, crowd-pleasing, hot, aerodynamic, silly or record-breaking ever happened in your bed? I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt and say it has. So the difference between you and this event is that your spectacle (probably) didn’t happen in front of a mob of drunks on as glorious an April day as you could order out of a goddamn Hallmark calendar.       This was the scene at the    Fairvilla Megastore   Conch Republic Red Ribbon Bed Race  down Duval Street in Key West, a benefit for AIDS Help, which took place this past Saturday. More than 20 businesses participated in this charity goodf allism, racing real beds which must be a certain size, have a mattress, four wheels that touch the ground, four runners pushing and be manned or womaned by one person.             Once you get past the rules the cool thing is outfitting your bed for maximum creativity – there was a coffin bed and a bong bed, and pirate
Read more

Say Ahhhhh: Drive-Thru Pap Smears in the COVID era

Image
        Listening to my friends talk about the COVID-19 test I thought it was going to feel like getting a lobotomy.      “They stick a swab so far up your nose, I felt like it was going into the back of my eye,” one said, but when free drive-through testing was offered in my little Florida beach town I went. I can pinch a penny until Lincoln starts crying and if something is free, I’m going to get one, even if it means being skewered like a corn dog.  The test was mildly irritating. You tilt your head back and they do, indeed, poke a swab up your snoot farther than you’d expect it to go. It felt like I’d been bike riding and got ladybug stuck up my nose, a sensation which lasted about 45 minutes after the actual sticking. It wasn’t as bad as I anticipated, but I’d anticipated getting my eyeballs yoinked out through my nostrils.  Anything else was emotional found money. What left a more lasting impression than the test was the joy of drive-through medical service. Si
Read more

Drumpf Scare: Why I Worry About the Drumpf Signs I DON'T See

Image
I have nerves like a chihuahua and since my traditional election night  vodka-and-Pepto has become too strong a beverage for me I just want  to be with like-minded people supporting Hillary Clinton. I asked a friend if he wanted to  join  me at a watch party.    “Can I wear my Trump undies?” he texted back. “Can I burn them in effigy? Not while you’re wearing them, of course,” I replied.  I was joking but the conversation gave me what I call Drumpf scare which is like a “jump scare,” the horror movie trope where a viewer jumps out of their seat in terror after being lulled into a false sense of calm. A Drumpf scares is when you realize someone you thought you knew might be a Drumpf supporter as I worried about my friend. It’s that same feeling as when you realize “The calls are coming from the inside of the house!” My guess is that there are a lot of dark Drumpfers out there, people who support someone I think of as the Hitlerian Cheeto, but who don’t want to be met
Read more