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.