Lady and the Tramp Stamp

Celebrating a Deathday™: Blue-eyed, later blue-haired, Eye-talian American singer/actor/horse beheader Francesco Alberto Sinatra (not pictured here, though that could be his hat) died on this day May 14, 1998, but then, so did journalist/ feminist/ environmentalist Marjory Stoneman Douglas (pictured here in Frank Sinatra's hat) and she lived to be 108 years old, why should she be given short shrift on her last day, especially with all that she accomplished in her lifetime in comparison to a chain-smoking, mafia-connected little Napoleon who foisted Frank Sinatra Jr. onto the planet? Marjory Stoneman Douglas almost single-handedly saved the Florida Everglades, petitioning and writing about it at great length, persuading the normally dimwitted Florida politicians and populace of the wetlands merits, thereby stopping the blood-sucking developers from draining it and building a bloody jai alai or shuffleboard stadium atop it. Meanwhile, Mr. Frankie Goes to Hollywood was draining martini glasses and squiring one broken woman after another down the aisle — first wife Nancy, second wife Ava, or possibly Eva, Gabor, or possibly Gardner, third and fifth wife Elizabeth Taylor, fourth wife Mia Farrow — whose baby Rosemary went on to marry misguided clarinetist Woody Allen — and, somewhere in there, his beloved Barbara. Granted, the sawed-off womanizer could sing — as could daughter Nancy in her plasticine mini-up-to-her-hoo-ha skirts — and sing he did on standards like, “Strangers In The Night (Exchanging Glances and, Likely, Fluids),” “My Way (Which Is To Say Paul Anka’s Way)" and “The Lady is Tramp Stamped.” Meanwhile, Marjory Stoneman Douglas was singing a different song, on important issues such as women’s suffrage and civil rights, along with the aforementioned role she played in the protection of the Everglades, an activity she began when she was 79 years old. Bloody hell, Sinatra only made it to 82! A giantess of a crusader — even at 5 ft. 2 inches tall — Stoneman Douglas was a tireless reporter, op-ed columnist and fiction writer whose stories were published in The Saturday Evening Post™, and about whom ‘twas said that only death could shut her up. Sinatra, on the other hand, hasn’t stopped yapping and continues to woo ladybirds from the A.M. radio dial. We wish a fond Happy Anni-hearse-ary™ to this unlikely pairing, who share a deathday, if not the same otherworldly space, which is to say Heaven and Hell.