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Portland-area fan Kate Yule died yesterday. She had the same kind of brain cancer as I do: astrocytoma, which is a form of glioblastoma multiforme. When I received my diagnosis, about a year after hers, she sent me an email with the subjectline, "Welcome to the Club". I appreciated the gallows humor, but the thing that really moved me about this ( Read more... )

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“It was so heavy it kept listing to the left, I swear they had to nail that thing to my head! It was gorgeous Max Factor hair. It cost a lot of money and somebody stole it. I still have visions of that damn wig turning up. I go down to Skid Row for my recovery program - I’m clean and sober now - and I keep expecting to find some bag lady or drag ( Read more... )

I probably met Art Widner sometime in the '80s. I'm not sure exactly when. It quickly came to seem he'd always been there, but if he retired from teaching at 65, that would have been in 1982, so my best guess is that it would've been sometime after that, although it appears that he started getting active in fandom again (after 30 years away) in ( Read more... )

Yesterday was the memorial gathering for Stu Shiffman. It was held at the Lake City Community Center, not far from where his wife, Andi Shechter, now lives. At some point Carrie Root counted forty people in attendance. I knew most of the people, but there were a few who were new to me, including a friend of Andi's who has known her since fifth ( Read more... )

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Well, it's a sad day when I use this userpic, which was drawn by Stu Shiffman, to head a memorial post about Stu. As most of my friends in science fiction fandom will have already heard, Stu died last week. He had suffered a massive stroke two years ago, but had made a far greater recovery than I ever expected before he fell and reinjured himself a ( Read more... )