Joan Winston: Recollections and Tributes
Joan passed away on September 11, 2008. Additional Memorial Tributes are linked through a large table on the main page of this site.
Presented as Part of A COMPANION IN ZEOR'S
Thirtieth Anniversary Year
Part of A Companion in
Zeor
Recollections, for inclusion, can be e-mailed to Karen MacLEOD
Additional earlier tributes are linked through a table at the bottom of this page.
Please note in your subject line JOAN WINSTON, or something similar, to weed out from the spam this address receives.
Bye, Joanie (Joan Winston's funeral)
It always seems the same, funerals always catch people off-side.
Joan Winston's service was a hot, humid Sunday morning in the Upper
West Side, the Plaza Funeral Home on Amsterdam Av & 91st St. There
were apparently just enough Jewish folks in attendance to have a
minyan. Friends who would have wanted to be there were far away or
about to go to hospital, or simply didn't know. We immediately
started reeling off the names of people who should have been informed.
Sharane Carr and Roberta Rogow were the first familiar faces I saw
there, and together with six other women I'd known from my earliest
Trek Con days we filled the front row. Ben Yalow showed up (of
course he wore a bow tie), as did a handful of Joanie's blood
family, a gentleman reportedly from CBS, an attorney involved with
an ongoing lawsuit and the Rabbi from the Riverdale convalescent
home she'd been living in.
The traditional Failure to Communicate came up before the service
began: There was talk of who was going to the burial and where it
would be when a family member revealed that there was already a
space for Joan in the family plot that no one organizing the
funeral had been told about. So there would be no burial today,
probably Monday or Tuesday. "Typical Joanie," Roberta said,
bringing a little smile to the temporary confusion.
This service was simple and has apparently been webcast but I
didn't get the URL being used; hopefully that information's being
spread by others. The Rabbi didn't really know much about Joanie or
fandom but he gave the audience a proper Vulcan salute (doubtlessly
easy for him) and worked "where no man has gone before" into his
eulogy without sounding contrived. The written messages of
Angelique Trouvere (Destiny from Trek Con costuming days), Amy
Harlib, George Takei and several others were read, and Roberta sang
the Kaddish at the end.
Before and afterwards, we of original Trekdom talked of the good
times, of Joanie's wide-open embrace of the people she'd meet, even
if it was their first time. I didn't know she knew Joan Crawford,
for example. We talked of her fantastic wardrobe, the celebrities
she knew as friends, and her sometimes shocking costume choices at
conventions, including that famous--and accurate--Amazon costume.
We talked about everything but her illnesses; Joanie was not about
being sick, she swept her conditions to the side as mere physical
stumbling blocks. Her life had been far more interesting to her,
and to us.
Feel free to copy and distribute this to those you think would be
interested.
TTFN
BCNU
Abby Winterbreucke
It's not life that's short--it's your attention span!