dead: Joseph Scoren (Letting Go/DS; Chicago; Naked Lunch)

[verushka70]

Talk about 6 degrees of separation.

I just discovered something sad. I'm up because I have to work Sunday night from 6:30pm-7am, so I try to stay up all night the night before so I can sleep all day on the day I have to go to work. That's why I was watching this B-movie "Boy Meets Girl" at 3am, with Joe Mantegna (alumnus of the same junior college where I graduated from nursing school! and much more, of course). Just for fun, I went to IMDB to look up "Boy Meets Girl" and see at what point in everyone's career they were in this film. It so happens that Joseph Scoren (aka Joseph Scorsiani) was in "Boy Meets Girl" -- along with Sean Astin (Sam Gamgee of LOTR fame) and Emily Hampshire (who was also in The Last Stop).

I'd first seen Joseph Scoren in Naked Lunch, with Peter Weller, as Kiki -- one of the Interzone boys Bill Lee gets it on with when he finally admits he's gay. And Scoren was quite hot in that flick as one of "les boys."




I mean, look at the pretty! And slashy!!

Years later he played Dr. Carter's lover Kevin, in the Due South ep Letting Go. Apparently by that time he had changed his stage name. Later he was also in Torso (which CKR was in), and in Chicago (playing the husband who was caught in bed with two women and shot by one of the women imprisoned with Velma and Roxie). He was very pretty in that, for all of the two seconds he had of screen time.

Well, he's dead. He died in 2005 of a heart attack caused by sarcoidosis, according to his IMDB bio.

He was 41. Jesus. A year older than me. I didn't know him personally, obviously. Now, a lot of people died in my ER between 6:30am Christmas Eve and 7am on Wed. 12/26 (six that I'm aware of on my two shifts, and probably others on the day shifts). And that's just one Chicago ER. I heard it was bad in ERs all over town, and we also got deaths radioed in by EMS responders which later were declared crime scenes because they were suicides or DUI deaths. One still had his toe in the shotgun trigger when they found him.)

But still. It's just. Sad. I was sad to find out that Joseph Scoren, who I never met (and never will, now), but who provided me with many happy TV- and movie-escapism moments, is now gone from this earth. And I guess I haven't looked him up on IMDB in a couple years. Or I would have already found this out about a year and a half ago when it happened.

Comments

[buzzylittleb.livejournal.com]

That's really sad and he was so pretty in those pictures. :-(

[verushka70.livejournal.com]

I know, isn't he?? So sad. So young!

dead: Joseph Scoren

[maxinemayer.livejournal.com]

Oh, I'm so sorry to learn this! So sad, so young....

I try not to listen to the news or watch TV news at this time of year for fear I'll learn of the death of a celebrity whose work I loved, who gave me joy, who will never be back again. Shivers.

Recently, I learned of the death of Father Laurence L. Cassidy, SJ, an old old friend of mine. I googled him because I wanted to contact him again right before my husband died. Only to find out that Father Cassidy had died in 2006. Awful.

Last year I found out about the death of an old friend through a Beauty and the Beast the TV Series list I was on, with my email at AOL (I've since left AOL and if I'd left earlier, never would have known). Nan Dibble, who had shared her home with me in Cincinnati for a year and a half, and coached me so well with my writing, died early in 2006 at the age of 63, after only one year of retirement.... Horrible.

With these two deaths, I feel as though life shut a door in my face, almost as though death is mocking me. I've had so few friends over the years and Laurence and Nan were two of them, along with my husband Hannes. Dreadful feeling of isolation.

I know how sad you must be.

Be well, Verushka. I pray 2008 will be a better year in every way than the last.

Love, max

Re: dead: Joseph Scoren

[maxinemayer.livejournal.com]

Wow, my dear! You *have* had a tough last few years. I'm hoping that your health scare was just that, a scare, and that you're okay, health-wise, right now.

As far as being a "survivor" is concerned, apparently it doesn't matter if we talked the (suicidally depressed) talk; when it comes to the walk, we're still here, and we want to be! You, at least, mention all the things you didn't do yet (although finishing nursing school sounds like a terrific achievement to me) - like learning foreign languages and travelling. Me, when I become frightened of death, and cling to life, it's because I don't want to miss the new season of my favorite TV shows! Not kidding. When I get scared of death, that's the little tiny kind of thing I latch on to, that makes me want to live so fiercely!

I'm 67 years old, now, and I surely don't want to end up in a nursing home (but that's better than dying of cancer!). It is a bit too late for me to start eating healthy and exercising! But as far as cancer goes, it seems to me that I could more easily choose "death by cop" than find a way to avoid "death by cancer," if that's in my genetic cards. Neither is a "lifestyle choice," for me. Cancer just happens.

And - as you can see by my situation - finding and hanging on to the right (or even the wrong) man doesn't help! My Hannes, with whom I've been for 33 years, ups and dies on me at age 61, and there goes my cozy future, toddling into old age with my lifetime companion!

Yeah, we survive. We continue to survive. And that's good. Because the strength we embody gives itself to others, even if we don't know it. A few words in a story, a comment to an acquaintance in passing - these can turn the tide of a life, make somebody think, make somebody's life *better,* even if we don't realize we've done that. I truly believe that, and moreso for a nurse whose whole life is dedicated to helping the next guy just when she needs the help....

Verushka, I've missed you. Be well. May 2008 be a happier year than this last one, for everyone, but especially for you, old friend!

Love ya, max
maxmayer2@JUNO.com
http://members.tripod.com/~MaxineMayer/index.htm

Re: dead: Joseph Scoren

[verushka70.livejournal.com]

You are about the forty third person I've talked to who has mentioned so many losses in the last year or two or three. I pray 2008 will be better for all of us! I'm so sorry to hear of your friends and your husband's deaths. There has been so much sadness in the lives of so many people I know -- and in my own. I also felt like death was stalking my family, after my father's accident and decline, my stepdad's cancer diagnosis, my father's death, one year later my mother's cancer diagnosis, my stepfather's worsening cancer the past two summers with brief respites, only to have him die this past October, then my own "What's that discharge??" scare and first mammogram -- diagnostic, not routine screening.

Never realized that someone as suicidally depressed as I've been, as often as I've been, would have such a strong desire to live. You'd think a malignant discharge would be my suicidal dreams come true. But suddenly I thought, wait, I never learned Spanish or French or Italian or sufficiently improved my German! I never saw the Pyramids or Alaska or Vancouver or Montreal or Prague or Machu Pichu! Or even California! Perverse, huh? For all my misery over the years, I hadn't expected to cling so tightly to the life which afflicts me.

There have been some glimmers of hope. I finished nursing school, turned 40 and survived (worked a 12 hour shift the night before and 12 hour shift the night of!), and have been an ER nurse for the past four months. It lets me see the misery of other people's lives. There is a lot of it. A lot. Especially in those families that are broken, chaotic, too violent, too unstable to support each other. Though we may do a lot of infighting (more like "in-bickering"), at least my siblings and I put up a united front to family threats.

Someone told me once a long time ago (before I had to actually prove it) that I was a survivor. They meant of our shitty home environment before my parents finally split up, but I guess it translated into survivor skills.

The only problem with being a survivor, of course, is that you run the risk of being the last one left. Sounds like that has happened to you, and I'm so sorry. I know what you mean about death mocking you or stalking you or whatever we choose to call it. I suppose, in a way, death stalks us from the minute we're born. It just doesn't feel that way when you have friends and loved ones to walk by your side through life.

Now I worry that, with my woeful choices of unavailable or perpetually immature men (and my own great ambivalence towards marriage and terror of suffocation) and choices (thus far) not to breed, I'll be one of the many looking into my old age with no one to care for me, except possibly my nephews. I terrifies me because I see these people in the ER often. But then I also see the people kept in shit-hole nursing homes (some who have children), and they are often no better off -- often worse off. Seems there's no guarantees whether you have children or not.

Then I tell myself I'm going to get out there and shovel snow, start walking for exercise, be more active so I can stay as healthy as possible to the end (use it or lose it, right)?

But what really happens is I eat more left-over Christmas cookies, curl up in bed to read, or on the couch to watch a DVD or AVIs from my computer, or in bed with my cats and laptop to write fanfic. Clearly, I'm not scared enough. Not just yet. Not for anything like real self-improvement (she said sarcastically). It's like Beckett: You must go on. I can't go on. I'll go on.