Tim Russert’s wake is scheduled to begin in about an hour at St. Alban’s School on the grounds of the National Cathedral. The closed-casket wake will be held from 2 to 9 p.m. in the school’s Cafritz Refectory.

If you’d rather pay your e-respects, you can “Become A Fan” of Tim Russert on Facebook, where “Fans” have left messages in tribute to the media giant. A “Tim Russert” proxy also still posts from time to time:

Tim Russert wrote
at 4:18pm on June 14th, 2008
Thank you to all us

And if you’d rather just pay, $20 can get you this rather hasty—yet handsome!—commemorative Russert tee.

Here was little Debbie in happier times, from the alumni listserv of Charleroi High (Class of ‘74) in North Charleroi, Pa., an exurb of Pittsburgh off the I-70 corridor:

PALFREY, Deborah J.(Jeane)
803 Capitol Street
Vallejo, CA 94590

PHONE: 707-648-1000
FAX: 707-648-1000
EMAIL: JeanePalfrey@sprynet.com

Have lived in California, for the past 20 years. Self-employed, design/import(furniture/interiors). MBA in international business. Always threatening to go back to law school. Have supported the National Innocence Project (New York), California Innocence and now, LAEP/Life After Exoneration Program (Berkeley based grass root’s organization), since the late 90’s. Never could stomache injustice- social or otherwise. At current pace, most likely will be slugging it out in the California prisons/courts in my 60’s and 70’s. A good way though to take my final curtain call. Hobbies include travel(international, whenever possible), non-fiction, cooking (had to quit “Cookbook of the Month” Club when I ran out of shelf space), all of PBS and the Amazing Race (looking for a partner willing to jump out of planes). (Updated 8/6/05)

Al Copeland, Popeyes Chicken founder, is dead at the age of 64. Pour out some cajun gravy for the guy at one of D.C.’s 12 local Popeyes locations. Looks like Copeland led a pretty full life. According to NPR:

In 1989, Popeyes acquired rival Church’s Chicken, which later forced Copeland’s company into bankruptcy. Through good times and bad, Copeland led an extravagant lifestyle: sports cars, speed boats—and garish Christmas light displays at his suburban New Orleans home that were so popular that authorities had to direct traffic and neighbors filed lawsuits. There were lavish weddings and bitter divorces that were the talk of the town.

A footnote:

Copeland died in Germany, where he was getting treatment for a rare form of salivary gland cancer.

From salivating over his delicious chicken, no?

Dungeons & Dragons creator Gary Gygax is dead at 69, according to the CEO of Troll Lord Games. The developer of the new edition of D&D says he hasn’t “grokked” Gygax’s demise yet.

On Saturday I went to a memorial service for Ray Farkas. He died recently at 71.

I met him in the late-’70s when I was a teenager, and I knew then he worked in television, but for years to me he was just my friend Mark’s dad, a guy we had to hide from when we were raiding his liquor cabinet and/or refrigerator.

But that all changed in 1989, when I was watching a now-defunct CBS news magazine show called “W. 57th” and a segment called “Nashville” came on.

I’d made a pilgrimage to Nashville years earlier and fallen for the place, and this TV piece, in a matter of minutes, and with no voiceover, totally captured that city back when it was crammed with dirtball dreamers and guitars were just lottery tickets, before Garth Brooks screwed it all up by mainstreaming country music and bringing in all sorts of labels and corporate money. The film was so good it made me cry.

And, when the credits rolled, I saw it was made by Ray Farkas. He wasn’t just my friend Mark’s dad! He’s also a genius!

Everything I’ve seen by Ray in the years since confirmed this additional attribute. At his service, there was much talk about how before Ray Farkas came along nobody in TV news used all the long-distance camera shot and ambient-noise gimmicks found in that “W. 57th” segment and pretty much everything he produced in the last 40 years. They showed clips from Robert Kennedy’s 1968 presidential campaign, which Ray covered for NBC, and he was shooting his subjects from across rooms or highways even then. He had a style.

A few scenes from “Nashville,” which I hadn’t seen since 1989, were also shown. I cried all over again, as I know I would have even if Ray was still alive.

If the Post has truly cracked the code of what works on newspaper blogs, well, we’ve been doing it wrong; see “What Doesn’t Work,” bullet point No. 1. But heaven knows a whole bunch of Post blogs are in violation of rule number four of the nine-point checklist, which says a blog must be updated once every weekday. (I’m looking at you, Post I.T.) If WaPo managers do start cracking the whip on the productivity end, I’d be happy to see more of Post Mortem, which is written by paper’s obituary writers.

Post Mortem is the only Post blog that I’ve been inspired to add to my RSS feedreader; I’m not particularly morbid, but I am an adherent to the argument that obits are often the best-written stories in the paper. (One of my all-time favorite ledes comes from this New York Times obit.) Mainly, I’m a sucker for the weird, picayune details that tend to emerge only on the death beat: the BLS staffer who Nixon accused of being part of a Jewish cabal; the Army lieutenant colonel who turned out to have a second career as a hotel pianist; and the always-hilarious dead person who isn’t actually dead.

A couple weeks back the blog tried to get itself moving more often by launching a daily roundup of obits. Alas, like many attempts to launch a regular feature on a blog, it’s, uh, dead.

Today is a sad, sad day in the life of Washington City Paper, which is what staff writer Jessica Gould and I explained to the owner of Ko Gi Bow, the Korean bakery on Adams Mill Road. People are losing their jobs today, we told him, asking him to write “This sucks.”

The “s” was lost in translation, but no matter. We think he captured the sentiment perfectly. I mean, what goes better with a severance and a kick in the pants than some whipped cream frosting, moist, delicious cake, and a couple of slices of fresh fruit? I’m open to ideas.

Because the truth is there is nothing we who are staying can say or do for the talented, funny, smart, wonderful, hard-working, stylish, liquor-swilling, disco-loving, fabulous, fun (did I mention smart and funny?) people who are leaving. Our production department and our art director are truly the heart of CP. They can never be replaced, even if Atlanta is, in the words of our new CEO when he announced the sale and the loss of their jobs, “a great place to live.”

They will be missed. Let’s eat cake.

Joe Stanley, Dec. 1, 1935–Jan. 7, 2007.

To five decades’ worth of D.C.–area musicians and fans, saxophonist Joe Stanley was—as the title of his only album claims—the King of the Honky-Tonk Sax.

Stanley (pictured with the Saxtons, circa 1963) passed away Sunday evening, Jan. 7, at the age of 71. He had been diagnosed with brain and lung cancer in early December.

During his 50-plus years in D.C.’s music scene, Stanley led several bands—most notably the Top 40 show band the Saxtons—but he was most widely known as one of D.C.’s most sought-after sidemen. “[He was] the top instrumentalist in town,” says Mark Opsasnick, author of Capitol Rock, a history of the area’s early rock scene. “He was on call all over town.” Bandleaders from rival clubs would contact Stanley while he was onstage at one bar, Opsasnick says, and hire him to play with another band across town later that night.

“You had to do what you had to do to make a living,” Stanley told Opsasnick for Capitol Rock, “and I’d play seven nights a week.”

An original member of the Rainbows—which also featured Marvin Gaye—Stanley played with other D.C. hitmakers such as Link Wray, Don Covay, and Billy Stewart, as well as future Hee Haw star Roy Clark and Charlie “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” Daniels. Before he received his diagnosis, Stanley had been scheduled to tour with Delbert McClinton.

“Joe was the kinda guy…who somehow learned to play nightclub jazz, and R&B, and country, and rock ’n’ roll equally well,” says Bill Holland, longtime D.C. musician and former D.C. bureau chief for Billboard. How Stanley became so versatile, however, remains a mystery. “I don’t know whether he was self-taught; I’m sure he never went to music school,” Holland says. “I think he learned on the street, listening to people play live, and records,” says bassist John Previti, who played on Stanley’s album. “He had no music theory, per se. He was just seat-of-the-pants and ear all the way.”

Whatever his methods, Stanley developed a signature sound. “Nobody has that old-fashioned, real big, fat, Earl Bostic sound anymore,” says rockabilly stalwart Billy Hancock, a friend for 43 years and the last performing member of the Saxtons. “Most of the sax players these days…they go for a sweeter, higher [sound]. His was the big-brass-balls sound.”

Chris Hall, who manages Chick Hall’s Surf Club—the Bladensburg roadhouse where Stanley played a regular gig for the last few years—recalls that his mother was a fan of Bill Black’s Combo. Tired of hearing her family rave about “’this guy Joe,’” Hall recalls, she asked, “’Is he as good as the sax player in Bill Black’s Combo?’” When Chris told his mother that the two sax players were, in fact, the same person, he says, she responded, “’Oh, well, then he’s pretty good.’” (Stanley took over the Combo after Black’s death in ’65.)

“All of the staff loved Joe,” says a longtime Surf Club bartender who gave her name as Lori. “He will be sorely missed. We are all just heartbroken.”

Previti agrees. “With him gone—we just seem to be losing one of the pillars of our whole scene,” he says. “He was one of the people you gather around, you know?”

I’d rather have introduced myself with something a little cheerier. But like theater, life leaves you shell-shocked as often as it leaves you cheering. So here goes:

D.C. theater veterans were staggered to learn last week that Source Theatre founder Bart Whiteman had died suddenly of a heart attack—just collapsed in his office, and the next minute he was gone. He was 58. He had a wife and kids. And he was one major reason D.C. has become one of the best theater towns in the United States.

Whiteman had moved to Tennessee in 1992, and news of his death didn’t reach D.C. until a week had passed. The Post weighed in with an obit on March 24, and the City Paper is planning a story for this week’s print edition. Meanwhile local theater types are remembering Whiteman over on Theaterboy.net (my day blog): He was “many things to many people,” writes one designer who’d worked with him—”an entrepreneur when Washington theatre desperately needed one, a genius, a bully, a romantic and an artist and yes, sometimes a crook.”

(That last is a nod, for those not in the know, in the direction of a late-’80s flap in which Source produced plays by major playwrights, living and dead, without getting the proper permissions?or paying the proper royalties. Not long ago, Whiteman, who kept in touch with the D.C. theater scene from afar, weighed in on that flap when someone took his name in vain on Theaterboy as part of a back-and-forth on permissions.)

Whatever noun you choose for Whiteman, to grasp what he meant to D.C. theater you’ve got to remember that when he started Source back in the late ’70s, only madmen and dreamers would’ve imagined that something like the Zinoplex (Studio Theatre’s multi-auditorium drama palace) would one day exist at the corner of 14th and P Streets NW. With Studio’s Joy Zinoman, Whiteman was one of the first theatermakers on a block that’s now a pretty major piece of the American theatrical landscape.

Another way to get your head around it: Source was the first non-Equity theater in town, according to the Post obit. Another way of saying that: Before Source, the D.C. theater scene was nothin’ but Arena Stage and a couple of other big players.

Today, there are 56 professional theater companies eligible for the Helen Hayes Awards (and plenty of smaller operations that aren’t quite big enough to be included in that count). The HH-eligible troupes produced 7,169 performances last year and sold 1.9 million tickets to them.

And if you read what D.C. theaterfolk are saying about Bart Whiteman, that richness, that diversity, that sheer number of people making theater had a lot to do with his role as evangelist and cattle prod and crazy-ass visionary.