Janet Lever

Hipper Dead Than Alive: 

How come I get to spend eternity in the shadow of
Marion Davies’ mausoleum, just in front of Charlie Chaplin’s mother, and around
the bend from the memorial bench for legendary film idol Tyrone Power?  I’m writing this addendum to my Life Stories
to provide this link to the back story of how I got this dream plot, because landing an ideal piece of real
estate in L.A. —even when it’s in a graveyard–can be complicated.

LAMAG.COM : I Got My Dream Plot in Hollywood Forever Cemetery—Almost

Considering whether this prime spot would make me an eternal
party crasher, I felt I was hip enough—at least as professors go—to be across
from Hollywood royalty. If you read this L.A.
Magazine saga, you’ll see that I not only wrongfully lost my first-choice
plot, directly across from Cecil B. DeMille and family, I lost a great epitaph
too.  I’m still working on a replacement.
“Hipper Dead than Alive” is a contender but will ‘hip’ retain any colloquial
meaning generations from now?  A friend suggested the epitaph “A Little Star” because of my short
stature and my several ties to the media, along with proximity to celebrity. I
had after all become a close friend of Pele’s (see photo in video #1 “A
Serendipitous Career”) while doing research in Brazil for my sociological study Soccer
Madness. (Now, in hindsight, I can report my book stayed
in print a remarkable run of 34 years.) I did a six-year stint co-hosting the
show “Women on Sex” for the Playboy Channel in the 1980’s. Hugh Hefner himself
endorsed what we believe is TV’s only all-female production to this day.  Then I coauthored Glamour’s “Sex and Health” column throughout the ‘90’s, and wrote
several of the biggest mass media sex surveys to date for ELLE and msnbc.com in the first decade of the new millennium. I am
on crack interdisciplinary teams that are still reanalyzing the data sets for
social science, management, health, and medical audiences.

 It’s been 15 years since I recorded the three-segment
“Life Stories.”  I’m in the process of
retiring after more than four decades of teaching. I haven’t figured
out what I will try to do during the last stage of life, in addition to
traveling, hanging out with loved ones, and drinking better wines. If I’m
blessed to stay on my serendipitous path for a long while, I may get to add
another update here before I go.

Meanwhile, putting my estate affairs in order led me back to the
choice of eternal resting spot.   If
you’re reading this and haven’t attended to this grim task for yourself, let me
tell you that it was a whole lot easier when I purchased my plot in my mid-50s
than when I needed to revisit the purchase as I approached my 70^th birthday, with mortality looming so much closer. My advice: the sooner the
better.  I can also suggest to you that
spending relaxed time in any beautiful cemetery in the here-and-now makes it a
less alien and forbidding place.