I once wrote a joke I never got to use on stage. Or give to my hero Joan Rivers. It involves the longevity of one’s career:

I’m so old. It’s a little-known fact but I’ve been around so long, I’m the one who originally gave St. John his wart.

Technically it should be wort, but aurally it works. Who me? A killjoy?

I’m also so old I can remember when search engines actually worked. Optimization simply means all search results are now bought and paid for. It doesn’t matter how well-crafted your query is. Type in “eukyarotic cell formation” and the first few hits will probably be Target or Amazon.

I think I’ve found a work-around for this pay-for-display fraud. It’s my new, patent-pending imag-i-search technique. After pulling up results, instead of scrolling through pages of paid-for verbiage hit the images tab. Then find the picture that best fits and clique to view the article.

I found Ann Behringer by using the search “Jerry Hall Tina Turner backup dancer 1980s.” I’ve always considered it a masterstroke of PR genius for Tina to hire a backup singer who was a dead ringer for Mick Jagger’s girlfriend at the time. Mick and Tina have been trading on gender/identity confusion since he took the name “Turner” in the 1969 film Performance. To make her early 80’s comeback she showed him who’s boss.

I rarely reread what I’ve published because these blog posts are like my children. Memories of childbirth pain come flooding back.

But Mark Zuckerberg recently reminded me of my Tina Turner piece of a year ago. I think it was one of his favorites. I looked at it again this morning and it wasn’t half-bad. Thank God for epidurals.

I wrote it because my sources told me last November she was near death.  I thought I should get a leg up on memorializing her.

As I started to work on it, however, I realized I’m not a professional obituary writer. I should do something positive. My words of admiration could have been written or spoken on any day of the last fifty years.

The aforementioned sources have since been fired. As of today (one more again!), Proud Mary keep on burnin’.