Untimely death was a bit of a theme this week:

I learned during the week that my friend Ed Billy had died. He was a guy I knew from Montclair. Our sons James and Thomas were buddies and we were both UUs. He was a jazz lover and I always looked forward to running into him. Always a smile and a friendly word. When I was the UU Montclair President, he had volunteered to look after the building and we worked together frequently. But one of my strongest memories of Ed was when we were called to the Montclair Police Station, where our sons were being held for trespassing in a parking garage owned by a car dealership. The police were pretty relaxed about it, perhaps in part because I was on the Town Council at the time and knew a lot of them. Ed was simultaneously bemused and annoyed at the kids and forever after referred to them as “the knuckleheads” whenever we met. Ed was one of those people who, while he was not in my inner circle of friends, was an important part of my life for many years and I will feel the hole created by his loss for years to come.

The deaths of Alan Rickman and David Bowie, both coincidentally dying in the same week at the age of 69 from cancers that neither had publicized, probably struck people harder here in London that it did in the U.S. Both were products of London and Londoners and Brits identified with them in a deeper way than most Americans. Bowie in particular seemed to have place deep in the hearts of working class Brits of a certain age.

David Bowie was a larger than life sort of figure, a visionary artist who was one of the first to merge performance art and rock and roll. He was much more than a rocker or a pop star and I always thought that there was a deep intelligence and creativity underlying his many personas. He was introduced to me in the early 1970s by Bill Cifrino, who returned to college in the fall of whatever year it was having become a big fan. (I think this was in the Ziggy Stardust period.) Bowie never fascinated me the way that he did some, but you always were curious about what he was going to do next.

The death of Alan Rickman was a sadder occurrence for me. I think this is partly because of the special feeling of “discovery” Judie and I had seeing him playing the Vicompte de Valmont in “Liaisons Dangereuses” on Broadway in 1987. He was just slimy, repulsive, sexy and brilliant in a performance that combined not just his voice but how he moved his body. You couldn’t take your eyes off him and kept thinking as the play went on “My God, who is this guy?” Within a year or so, he played Hans Gruber in “Die Hard” and the rest of the world had the same feeling. He was not just a great actor, but, according to the many articles about him appearing the media here, was just a very nice person, a fact that was confirmed on Sunday when someone at the New Unity congregation lit a candle for him and reminisced about how well he had treated her when she was a young nobody working at the Donmar Warehouse Theatre.