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When I asked Domingue about hooking me up with some pro mourners, he said, "Man, I never heard of that. And I'm from New Orleans. But if that's what you want, buckaroo, we're going to get it for you." Though I trust his taste, I posted an ad on Craigslist in the L.A. Talent Gigs section just to be safe. Within a day, I had 17 offers, including one from Diana Conway, a 25-year-old struggling screenwriter, who said she'd charge $40 an hour. "I look really good in black," she told me. I also heard from Franklin Ruehl, who while neither young nor hot nor female, owns a dark suit and has appeared on the shows 1,000 Ways to Die and Ghost Whisperer and in the movie Pete Smalls Is Dead.
I'm going to have Conway, Ruehl and the band perform at the Hollywood Forever cemetery, which is right near my house, shows outdoor movies in the summer and is the final resting place of Douglas Fairbanks, Johnny Ramone, Fay Wray, Bugsy Siegel and Toto from The Wizard of Oz. Hollywood Forever will even produce one of its Life Stories for me--a documentary about my life that I assume will involve clips of Michael Ian Black and Paul Scheer saying cutting things about my hairstyle choices. I've also arranged for Distinctive Assets, the company that runs gift lounges for celebrities at events like the Grammys, to hand out gift bags that I'm hoping will contain robot spaceship teleporters. I'm intending to live a long, long time.
The more I got into the details of my funeral, though, the more I started to wonder if I actually want to die the way Mama Ann did: uncelebrated and unmourned. She absorbed all the pain of all the losses of all the people she loved and left nearly none of that sadness behind. Maybe it's nobler to fade away than to burn out.
But it seems a little late for nobility for me. Plus, I've already hired the band.