NEW Death in the Afternoon, Season 2 Episode 3: Dude, Where's My Monument?

Greetings Deathlings,  

Today Sarah, Louise, and I are delighted to bring you another installment of Death in the Afternoon! In this episode, we're asking the question: Dude, Where’s My Monument?

We know who gets fancy monuments: politicians, military heroes, and so many men on horses. In cemeteries the playing field may be leveling, with faces and names showing up that have never been represented in public sculpture before. But in other areas, monuments are business as usual, the dead forgotten, the Lizard People left unhonored. (That's right... the Lizard People.)

This is one of those episodes where there was so much more than what we included. 

At the top of that list is CREDITING ALLISON MEIER for helping to write and research this episode! We made a mistake, and we are terrible. Forgive us Allison. Everyone take a moment to acknowledge Allison in your cold, dead heart. 

[deathlings acknowledge Allison; somewhere in New York a chill goes down Allison's spine]

Here’s an article that Allison wrote with some great images of "A Memorial to Marriage". 

Oh and there's that Confederate monument I mention in my segment...

Removal of the confederate monument from L.A.'s Hollywood Forever Cemetery was widely covered at the time. Here’s more on that:  https://www.scpr.org/news/2017/08/16/74727/hollywood-forever-cemetery-to-remove-confederate-m/

This episode was also the first time we tried on-location recording, for Sarah’s segment. However much to our dismay it didn’t work out due to high winds on the day of the recording.

But here are some photos of Fort Moore Hill - former home of the dead, a beer garden, and the Lizard People. 

Sarah at the pool and waterfall, which wasn't working that day. 

I don't know about "strange people" living UNDER Los Angeles 5,000 years ago, but these days they walk among us...

And here is a very cool photo of a couple Cathedral High School cheerleaders. Go CHS Phantoms! Bury your opponents! 

Thanks for listening this week, deathlings! Stay tuned for another Death in the Afternoon episode later this month, as well as another video and new articles on The Order of the Good Death website!

(And ICYMI, I have a NEW book coming out in September! For more info and to order, go here: http://caitlindoughty.com/books/will-my-cat-eat-my-eyeballs)

Death in the Afternoon is a podcast written, researched, and developed by Caitlin Doughty, Sarah Chavez, and Louise Hung of The Order of the Good Death. 

Caitlin Doughty is a mortician and funeral home owner in Los Angeles, CA. Along with Sarah and Louise she runs The Order of the Good Death and the Good Death Foundation, orgs that spread the death positive gospel around the world through video series like Ask a Mortician, blogs, bestselling books, and now, a gosh darn podcast!

Sarah Chavez is the executive director of The Order of the Good Death. As the child of parents in the entertainment industry, she was raised witnessing choreographed Hollywood deaths on soundstages. Her work has been influenced by her unique life and weaves together the relationship between death and food, feminism, Mexican-American death rituals, and the strange and wondrous history surrounding the culture of death itself.

Louise Hung is writer/producer for "Ask a Mortician" and a community manager for The Order of the Good Death. While she can usually be found hunched over her computer working scripts, Louise has also been known to tap out a few words about death in folklore, history, pop culture, and Asian or Asian American communities.

Guest Writer: Allison C. Meier is a Brooklyn-based writer focused on history and visual culture. Previously, she was a staff writer at Hyperallergic and senior editor at Atlas Obscura. She moonlights as a cemetery tour guide.

Death in the Afternoon Theme Music: Dory Bavarsky

Editing: Landis Blair 

Engineering: Paul Tavenner at Big City Recording Studios and Josh Wilcox at Brooklyn Podcasting Studio