But if you were like me, you hardly heard of Etta James and that whole dying thing on Facebook because people were way overwhelmed by the OMGSURPRISE death of Joe Paterno. Joe Paterno, who was eighty-five years old and fighting lung cancer. Totally out of left field, that one was. I almost died, myself, of surprise.
Yeah, I don’t know if it’s a regional thing (I was born and raised in Pennsylvania, and a lot of my friends had gone to Penn State, so naturally, the childhood-friend section of Facebook was blowing all up about it), but it was big. Huge. People were contemplating suicide, saying Joe Paterno was like a grandfather, talking about what kind of “JOEPA TATTOOS” they should get … I kind of wanted to kill myself just listening to everything. I began vowing that anyone who posted anything about Joe Paterno or how Penn State gave him lung cancer and made him eight-five years old and because he was kicked out of the university as head football coach that was why he died, I would start unsubscribing from people. And folks, I did. Big time. I think there’s, like, twenty whole people left on my Facebook that actually show up in my feed, and the rest are websites’ feeds. No joke.
Anyway. Kelly did a show at the Radio City Music Hall this past weekend where she covered Etta’s classic song, ‘I’d Rather Go Blind’. Needless to say, she did an amazing job.
Don’t get me wrong – it’s sad and everything that Joe Paterno passed. But I didn’t know him any more than I knew Etta James. Both are sad. Sad, sad things. Lung cancer and leukemia suck. My thing is that I just think it’s strange what people say about others after they’ve died, and how people are randomly canonized because they were … well, whatever they were.
RIP Etta and Joe.