I don’t know if I’ve told you before that Gilda Radner – the original funny woman of Saturday Night Live – is my hero. Not only did John Belushi, who was quite vocal about women not being funny, concede that Gilda was a glowing exception, but she did a one-woman show on Broadway, married Gene Wilder and gave birth to one of my favourite all-time quotes: “You can always be beautiful at the after party.”
Imagine my delight then at stumbling across her autobiography in the tiny second-hand bookstore right here in Canmore today, for $3.50 nonetheless. That’s right. I have my heroes and I have them cheap.
I recall my delight last year in LA when, while strolling along the stars on Sunset Boulevard, I suddenly had the urge to stop and look down: only to find myself standing directly on Gilda’s star. I almost squealed. Thankfully I resisted – heaven’s knows Sunset Strip is NOT a place that anybody acts strange – but that feeling of excitement at having inadvertently connected to my hero, was screaming out inside me.
You can imagine then, the deafening shrieks of my innards when after buying my new treasure, I opened its cover, only to see scrawled on its first page:
If I don’t blog much in the next couple of days, you’ll know why.