Pen-Elayne on the Web

Bad News Day Continues

Another blast from my past has died as well. Via Heidi MacDonald, whose new RSS feed I hadn't gotten until this morning so I didn't catch up with her till just now, I discovered that Craig Calame, aka Mugsy from the Uncle Floyd Show, passed away last week after a long battle with cancer. My Uncle Floyd days (as one of the coterie of fans known as the "dirty thirty") straddled the period in the late '70s/early '80s between my friendship with Billy Marcinko and my self-publication of INSIDE JOKE (which started out as a Floyd fanzine), and I had a few dates with cast member Skip Rooney, who lived in the next town over, and even performed on the show once (playing guitar and singing a song I'd written about Floyd called "The Last of the Old-Time Clowns"). As was the case with Billy, I lost touch with most of these folks over the intervening years (the last time I saw Floyd was in the green room of a talk show to which I'd been invited because Proctor & Bergman were on, and that had to be about 15 years ago), so the emotional impact is a bit lessened, but it's still weird to lose folks with whom I used to hang out, particularly with my birthday coming up in a couple days and the inevitable thoughts of mortality on my brain. I wish I could say I had fonder memories of Craig, with whom I didn't really get along that well, but I'm glad his suffering is at an end.