Susan Lumiere

7/16/1944 – 4/13/2024

IMPORTANT NOTE:  This is NOT about Susan Hannon, my best friend for over 5 years.

On April 13^th, I lost my second friend in seven months. I guess she had been coughing a lot for a week or so and fainted a couple of times.  Then one day she passed out into a full bathtub and drown.

I “met” her on 11/4/2020 – at the height of the Pandemic – through a mutual email buddy.  We never dated but exchanged tons of emails (I counted over 3,000 in those 3½ years).  We did finally meet in person 5 or 6 times, either at her house parties or birthday celebrations for her or our mutual friends.

By conventional standards, she was weird, with beliefs in past lives, astrology, tarot, spiritual healing, psychics (even working as one for awhile), etc.  She worked as a belly dancer for awhile and was really into colors and fanciful costumes.  She loved glitter and even glued sequins, decals, and glitter to the steering wheel of her 20-year-old purple car.

BUT she was also incredibly intellectual and educated.  She was a gifted writer, writing LOOOOONG, punny, witty emails, jokes, parodies, satirical plays, etc.  I told her she had the manic creativity of Robin Williams.  Here is a tiny sampling of her emails (sent to a group of what she called her “cyberpals” or “cyberians”):  Susan’s Writing

She was Jewish, so she knew a ton about Jewish history, culture, customs, Yiddish and Hebrew, but she also had encyclopedic knowledge about other cultures and history, which made her an absolute wizard at playing Jeopardy!

Speaking of Jeopardy, we would each watch it and compare scores.  She almost always beat me – I think I tied her twice and beat her once or twice.  She typically scored in the 30’s (out of 60 possible), while I typically scored about 25.  We also noted if we “ran” a category and how many “triples” we got (a triple stumper is a question that none of the 3 contestants were able to answer).  We typically both got 2 or 3 a game.  I (and others) told her she should audition to be on the show, but she always had a ton of excuses why she wasn’t interested.  She used to love The Golden Girls but hadn’t owned a TV since then so she would watch it on the increasingly rare occasion the episodes were posted on YouTube or else check the results on the website “J Archive” that has all the episodes going back 40 years!

She recently started dating a guy and was really excited because she said he was the first boyfriend she ever had who could beat her in Jeopardy!

Now I don’t even feel like watching it.  If any of you want to step into that role, let me know.

She was an even bigger opera fan than I.  The only time we actually “went out”, we went to a Fathom event at a movie theater to watch The Metropolitan Opera perform Giordano’s  Fedora.  She also introduced me to two incredible tenors who I might consider as good as Pavarotti (who she didn’t care for!) – Matthew Polenzani – https://www.youtube.com/watch/UUvwIdo8R3c

and Piotr Beczala – https://www.youtube.com/watch/2lDqzQRo9aA

She would look things up for me from time to time, so I called her my CRA (Chief Research Assistant), pretending to be her boss and addressing her “Ms. Lumiere”, hinting at “a little extra something” in her paycheck when she did a task especially well.  She played along and called me “Boss”.  She always complained that those bonuses I promised never seemed to materialize!

Since all film auditions are “self-tape” now, I’ve been taping them with my phone in my apartment (they still call it “taping”, even though it’s all digital these days).  You usually need someone to read the opposite parts, so when those are female roles, I’ve asked her to record those lines on her phone and text them to me, whereupon I just splice them into the recording.  Here’s the last one she did for me, less than a week before she died: https://youtu.be/yDv1UFMVLD4

She also was a talented artist.  Here is some of her work:  Susan’s Art  Note: the Roman mosaic is the only one that wasn’t an original design.  She copied it while sitting on the floor of a Yugoslavian museum, then recreated it with aquarium rock.

She also created many rebuses, which I’d never even heard of.  They’re puzzles that are solved by looking at the picture and guessing what it’s trying to convey.  Each one represents something like a composer, actress, city or whatever.  The subject is at the top of the picture, followed by the number of letters in the word or words.  For example, the first one is a singer with 6 letters in the first name and 6 letters in the last name.  It shows a lion, a 2-letter phrase “AL” and a rich woman, so the answer is “Lionel Richie”.  Some of them are very obscure but most are fairly easy.  Let me know if you want a hint on any of them.  The last one is a friend of hers, so you probably won’t get that one.  She said she made 113 in one month!  Here’s a link to 66 of them:  Susan Rebus  All the answers are in the last frame. 

She loved to eat raw oysters and I sent her a link to an article about a woman who died after eating raw oysters but she said she had eaten them that way for years so she wasn’t worried.  She had always bragged about how healthy she was, with perfect blood pressure, blood cholesterol, and blood glucose.  She had some weird medical ideas, though, relying on questionable “medical” people, including a spiritual “healer” that she highly respected.

More pictures of her:  Susan Pics

RIP Susan.  You were definitely one of a kind.

“Boss Man” Jay