Forgive me if I'm not too into the National Gorilla Suit Day spirit this year. We just lost Catherine O'Hara.
She was one of those rare people I've never heard a bad word about. Like she was just as lovely offscreen as she was during any of her performances.
All these tributes will talk about Beetlejuice or Home Alone or SCTV or Nightmare Before Christmas or Schitt's Creek or A Mighty Wind. But I will stand up on a hill and say that acting opposite Fred Willard in Waiting For Guffman was one of her finest works. I embedded the Midnight At The Oasis audition scene and every second is absolute gold. Not just her acting skills. It takes a LOT of work to act and sing crummy AND be hilarious at the same time, and she made it all look easy. Notice how she's mouthing along to all of Fred's lines, too. And something she's always had a knack for? How her outfits tell a story all on their own. The matching track suits, and the bangs! It's really something only she could pull off, and you don't really think about these things.
TCM showed that and Best in Show last month (right before Rob Reiner and his wife were killed), so those performances were still fresh in my mind.
And she, like Eugene Levy with her, are and were incredible singers.
And I dare you to not have a dry eye after watching the A Kiss At The End of The Rainbow scene from A Mighty Wind.
How that lost the Best Original Song Oscar that year baffles me.
To give you a hint to how far and wide she reached people, when I came home from work yesterday, my mom said "did you see the news? Moira died!"
As in, Moira Rose from Schitt's Creek. That's how my mom knew her. And why wouldn't she? That role is just a master class all on its own. The way she says "Alexis" is seared into my brain. Like Fred Willard, she had this uncanny ability to make boring words sound so gut-bustingly funny.
Just a "Hi!" and you're on the floor. Only her.
Every single tribute shared a different scene and they're all iconic and nobody has a wrong answer. It's gonna be tough without her. And she was on The Studio and I heard it JUST started filming season 2. Can't imagine how they're gonna write around this.
And to get to the main topic: It did indeed snow.
We got at least a foot, which is, uh, not normal in recent years.
I actually had to shovel multiple times that day since it snowed for most of it. It became a real pain in the ass when I had to dig out my car.
And since it hasn't gone above freezing since last Sunday, about 90% of it is still around. And it's MOSTLY off the roads. I can't imagine what it's like living in a place that gets like this all the time. Or, like what's happening now in North Carolina, a place that has barely any infrastructure to handle it.
And one last thing to round out the month:
Walter Simonson?! At a small comic show near me?! For some reason, this was on a Tuesday, so I booked it out of work as soon as I could to take advantage of this really rare chance. The last time he was even around here was NYCC back in 2023, and I had no idea he was there until after the con ended. When he announced that he caught covid from it.
When he's usually at cons, he always had a super long line. Because he liked to chat, and, yeah, how rarely he shows up. And this was really no exception. There were about, maybe fifteen people in front of me? And I still waited about an hour. Mostly because two people in front of me wanted sketches and they waited a long time for him to do it. (As luck would have it, he had just gotten back from a dinner break when I got on line).
He was, of course, real nice and funny and it was really cool to see him sketch right in front of you.
He's most known for his work on the Thor comics, and being a co-creator of Beta Ray Bill. So naturally, I got him to sign my copy of The Mighty Thor #337, his first appearance.
It's the biggest original key issue I own. I own a few classics in reprint form, but this one's the real McCoy. I bought this off eBay in I wanna say 2018 because if the MCU was gonna add him to it, I'd better buy it before the price on it skyrockets, lest what happened to the first appearances of the Guardians of The Galaxy. No name characters that appeared in no name comics that now command big name prices because Zoe Saldana and Bradley Cooper play them in movies.
Well, he hasn't shown up yet, but it's still a key and it still commands a big price. But not as much as I thought it'd be. For a while, it was the most I paid for a comic.
But I also got Mr. Simonson to sign Beta Ray Bill's next two appearances, in Thor 338 and 339.
Pay no attention to the price tags, I got them for much cheaper at NYCC the year I bought them.
Thor 339, not only was it part of Assistant Editor's Month, but it's notable for being the first appearance of Beta Ray Bill's weapon Storm Breaker, and that WAS famously added to the MCU in Infinity War.
And just for fun I got a couple of the Frog Thor issues signed, too.
When are THOSE stories getting adapted, Feige?! And how can Kermit star in them?!
