David Strickland Appreciation and of Course Some of My Stuff

I was watching Suddenly Susan last night/this morning, however it is you perceive time.  And often times I gravitate to David Strickland’s performance.  He was always very funny.  Even his few appearances on Mad About You where he played a strait-laced bureaucrat tool.  He managed to find little things in that character that the character wouldn’t find funny but everyone else does.  On Suddenly Susan, his character of Todd Stites was a kind of ditzy naïveté.  He always found the funniest thing possible for Todd to do.  I can only imagine the outtakes and gag reels we never got to see on TV.  I never knew him personally, nor do I have any contact with anyone who knew him and I understand it’s very possible he wasn’t great company off-screen.  But his personal issues aside, the season three finale of Suddenly Susan suggests to me that he’s one of those people that everyone loved to be around.  It’s one of those pieces of television that always gets me weeping like a baby.  When I was a child I was always drawn to him whenever I would watch this show not knowing just much I relate to him.  Not unlike my affinity for Robin Williams.  Both men had tragic and devastating monsters following them through everything they did, and yet, they responded by everyone around them laugh.  When he died, I heard one person in particular mentioned how you could look at any photo of Robin and no matter how grande his smile his eyes always looked sad.  That hit right me right in my duodenum.  I was already weepy before I started this and needed a funny sounding anatomy word.  David Strickland was very much the same, in my observation.  I guess I always responded to this being someone who at a very young age, also had to learn to fake a smile.  Being an abused child in the nineties, especially growing up in a christian church, you don’t really get to be open about things without someone calling a hotline.  So, we had to fake a smile until we could get away for awhile.  So, I related to this and it seems I gravitated to people who we know now in retrospect, were going through things like I was.

I just wanted to put this out there because since I was a child I’ve been a fan of his and it turns out not just because Todd was a goofy clown chimping about.  He was going through some things leading up to his death, and anyone who knows me knows that there are some choices that I don’t judge like everyone else does.  And I have perspective on such matters that most don’t.  But I am sad that we didn’t get to enjoy more of his work.  Ultimately, we just have to accept that he’s better off now and that we need to make each other laugh.  The little I know of him, I’m pretty confident that he would at least agree with that last point.

This wound up being more than I anticipated so, no Stargate talk this time.  Probably tomorrow.