Happy Days Are Here Again Carrie Fisher
Humor to the Rescue: Carrie Fisher
Happy days are here once more
The skies above are articulate again
So let's sing a song of cheer again
Happy days are here once more!
A recording of Carrie Fisher singing the song, "Happy Days Are Here Again" plays through the theater to open her 2010 one-woman show, Wishful Drinking, based on her best-selling book of the aforementioned proper noun.
Fisher'due south alto is make clean and strong, which might be surprising considering that near people associate Fisher with her iconic office as Princess Leia in the Star Wars franchise. However, she began flirting with the performing arts as a singer when she was xiv, belting out an amazing rendition of one of the twelvemonth's most popular radio hits, "Bridge Over Troubled Waters," in front of the entire school at the jump assembly. Thirteen years later Carrie Fisher would ally the homo backside the music and observe herself the (sometimes unflattering) discipline of more than than i of his hit songs.
I'm watching Wishful Drinking on a summer night in 2020. Nosotros are cloistered inside these days. If and when nosotros do go out, we peer over the horizons of our masks and face up coverings at one another warily. Each person transformed into a video game avatar, a question marker hovering above their heads: contagious or safety? Our cities are chaotic chess boards, their economies strangled, their histories rewritten in real fourth dimension. Our Blackness citizens cannot breathe. Our government shrugs, shirks its responsibilities (bad optics, this America is definitely not ready for prime time, go to commercial), yanks the state from the burning zeppelin only to hurl us into the quicksand, which, TWIST is also crawling with fire ants. I hear David Attenborough narrating: Just happy days were non here again, nowhere to be found in fact. And I'm struck with the notion that there doesn't seem to be a more advisable messenger for this moment than the arch, sardonic, darkly funny Carrie Fisher, beamed into my living room ten years in the future, four years after her own untimely death, urging me not to look away at the smoking Hindenburg of our reality, but to express mirth correct in its face.
I was too young to fully appreciate Carrie Fisher when she arrived on our movie screens from a galaxy far, far away. I knew I liked the hard edge of her vox, all clipped sarcasm. This was non your typical damsel in distress. And to that cease, I really liked the mode she bossed Luke and Han around, effectively giving them the rundown of how this "rescue" mission was going to go. Don't let the white apparel or the giant pastries doubling for hair fool you lot: Princess Leia was all motherfucking girl power OG.
It wasn't until I saw Fisher in When Harry Met Sally that my adoration for her felt complete. Fisher plays Sally'south stalwart, romance-weary friend, Marie who takes the best lines for herself like a poker thespian raking in her chips: "Everybody thinks they have good taste and a sense of sense of humor, but they couldn't maybe all accept practiced taste." It inappreciably feels like Fisher had to act at all. What is When Harry Met Sally but waiting for Marie to reappear with the perfectly placed rejoinder or the enhance of an eyebrow lifted to punctuate the scene with irony, in between long scenes about 2 friends trying to not autumn in love with each other.
Fisher began sharpening that skill on the whet stone of her surreal life at an early on age. Born into a house of Hollywood royalty — the daughter of teen heart throb, crooner Eddie Fisher and America's sweetheart, motion-picture show ingénue Debbie Reynolds — Fisher grew upwards in a rarefied environment. Economic privilege: a sprawling house with three pond pools and 8 pink mini-fridges in various rooms, "In example Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs happened to driblet by," Fisher quips on stage. Elevated social condition. Her parents' friends fabricated up the elite and powerful circles of popular entertainment, drifting through her young life every bit easily as if they were cousins or aunts or uncles. And trauma. Reynolds' public, humiliating, and ultimately shattering divide from Fisher over his adultery with one of their best friends, the not-at-all-hideous Elizabeth Taylor, has been copiously documented and discussed in numerous writings and interviews, including ones past both Reynolds and Fisher (the scandal also makes its appearance as ane of the first "beats" of Wishful Drinking). The emotional, psychological, social, and economic smash zone of the Reynolds/Fisher explosion sealed itself around Carrie, putting her in an envelope of pain that she would spend the rest of her life using humour (and substance corruption) to ameliorate.
Wishful Drinking is a master class in how to pilot over life's treacherous current to college ground, which is non necessarily safer, information technology just provides the right perspective to survey where you've come up from, what yous've been through, and to procedure what it means earlier y'all're plunged dorsum into choppy waters. Information technology doesn't get amend in the sense of waking up i twenty-four hours to find y'all're in a Pixar motion-picture show where the flowers are singing and talking cars cheerfully greet each other on the street, Fisher tells us via the freefall of her ain life, it just goes on. I nod. I laugh, though information technology's non the kind of thoughtless, easy laughter that comes when everything gets happily buttoned upward at the end of a sitcom. I realize it's the laughter of relief: maybe aught volition exist okay, maybe instead of letting that truth lapidify effectually united states of america we employ information technology to propel united states forrad.
Near the end of her show Fisher recounts a chat she had with her daughter, Billie Lourde, who told her mother she wanted to exist either a singer or a comic:
Fisher: "If you want to be a comic, y'all've got to be a writer. And you accept tons of material. Your female parent is a manic depressive drug addict, your begetter is gay, your grandmother tap dances, and your granddaddy eats hearing aids. My daughter laughs and laughs and laughs. And I said, 'Infant, the fact that you know that's funny is going to save your whole life." The audition laughs and applauds. Equally Fisher starts to give her terminal thoughts for the evening, an ambulance siren wails in arroyo. "Oh," she says with a small smile, "in that location's my ride." More laughter and applause. Just she's not entirely joking. After taking her bows to a standing ovation, attendants move through the theatre trailing a infirmary stretcher. They load Fisher onto it, wheeling her out through the lobby waving and maxim hello to people as she passes through. They load her into a waiting ambulance. Information technology'south classic Fisher gallows' humor, a wink to her numerous hospitalizations, to the revolving door of medicalization and handling that has been her journey as an addict and person with bipolar disorder. It's also her ideology writ large: humor saves, giving us a fighting chance for those happy days, once over again.
Source: https://wordnerdshe.medium.com/humor-to-the-rescue-carrie-fisher-1a6200ea6d12
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