tIl d3ath #25: "Come Out and Play"

A review of S02E03 of the American sitcome 'Til Death.

You were strong. You were brave. You are gone. You are not forgotten.

You were born on the ground in Cambridgeshire and that was the last time your feet touched ground. You flew. You flew to the tops of charts and you flew deep into our hearts. You never lost that accent. You weren't from Australia, despite what people might assume because of your iconic role, or because of your duel citizenship later in life.

You were the light for so many.

You must remember that time, on the set of Grease, that you and Eddie were taking a break, and he asked you about your childhood, and for some reason you started talking about a particular trauma that had occurred so long ago, and had been kept hidden for so long. Eddie was preparing to be hit in the face with a whipped cream pie and you told him about what happened, when you barely escaped death. That you had been changed forever.

And then years later you were sitting down on a chaise longue in your palatial estate and you were, as so many people around the globe were doing at the time, watching the American sitcome Till Death, and you were struck with the notion that you had seen this before, had lived this exact plotline that was on the TV, that you knew intimately what it meant to not be able to do something even though everyone assumed that you could. Like the tall dude, what's his name, the guy from Nightmare Ned, you know who I mean, how he told his hot wife that he could play basketball but he could not. Or how pasty piefucker guy made it seem like he was a hotshot tough guy but character actress Kat Foster knew him well enough to know it was all bluster. To want to be one thing, and know in your heart of hearts that you are actually something—someone—else.

You could never quite articulate what that episode meant to you in your lifetime. How it touched some deeper memory. You suspected it was kin to the emotion that you felt when you were young and you almost died, but how, how they were intertwined, you could never seem to understand. You can't know that your loved ones continued the search after you passed. That they are here now, ready to tell you what they have learned. You will be so pleased to hear what they whisper in your ear as you lie in your coffin specially prepared for you.

You flew, but you feared hitting the ground. You were alive, truly alive, but you were fascinated with death, so closely did you feel its heat. You were seen as a source of hope and you radiated love, but they did not know you. You knew you, and you, unfortunately, believed that you had nothing to give. That's how you lived your life, believing that it was all a lie, that no one really knew you, the true you, and you thought they would be disappointed if they knew. That death had wrongly passed you over, so long ago, and now it was coming to claim what was rightfully his.

But you were wrong. You lived and you were meant to live. Like every episode of the American sitcome Til Death, your life was a 5 puke out of 5 life. Let today be a tribute to your life, and the way you lived, and the way that you allowed others to live. We live today in honor of that life that you had and didn't want but kept anyway. Your life was, thus, one of courage. Let it be known that we now know you, the real you, and that we stand here today and proclaim that we love you, everything about you, and that we're proud of you. You should know this, wherever you are. You were Olivia fucking Newtown-fucking-John. You lived. You lived!