My Joan Rivers Story

Joan Rivers died this afternoon.

I was visiting my Mom in Florida, Spring of ’01, and channel-hopping at the hotel late in the evening, I passed E! Now, I’m not much of a fan of E!, but the picture seemed to be of a stripper with Joan Rivers’ head atop a body with a somewhat-oversized bosom, and the narrator talking about when Joan was a stripper in Scarsdale. “More when ‘E! True Hollywood Story: Joan Rivers’ continues…”

I was intrigued, to say the least. So I sat thru the commercials to find what appeared to be a hugely broad lampoon of a Joan Rivers biography. Then I realized: it was April 1.

This show was hilarious, both as a parody of Joan but also of “E! True Hollywood Story” (I hope they rerun it). Two parts stand out in my memory. One was that the episode had a lot of clips of Melissa talking about what a great relationship she and Joan had, counterbalanced with “anonymous” clips of someone claiming they hated each other. This individual’s face was obscured by a then-infamous “blue dot” and her voice was processed, presumably to hide her identity. But, later in the episode, once or twice she would move around just enough so we could see part of her face; of course, it was Melissa. But maybe my favorite single moment was the clip of Lorna Luft (daughter of Judy Garland, sister of Liza Minelli): “I used to think my family was screwed up. Then I met Joan and Melissa Rivers.”

Joan’s willingness and ability to make fun of herself and her image in this episode, and do it so well, renewed my “fanship” of Joan, someone who I practically grew up on but of whom my interest had flagged during her E! heyday.

Bye, Joan, gonna miss you.