Sunday, November 27, 2016

IN THE WORLD: Nathan Fillion and Ruben Santiago-Hudson

I commented to a friend today that so many wonderful people died this year, I needed a constant stream of people who are still alive to counteract what I'm beginning to feel is an epidemic of losing amazing people, and being left with Donald Trump.

I do not care for religion, and the more I hear people arguing and excluding each other over it, the more I am reminded of the same ways people in power use racism and sexism to keep people distracted, instead of paying attention real ways they could be making things better.

But Shepherd Book's calm questioning and acceptance of the people around him invites the best comparisons with religious people I know and admire. People who use their faith to help those around them and include them, not to pass judgement. You know, unless those people might need to be reminded that they are doing something fundamentally incorrect.



I don't know anything about Ron Glass personally, but as a lover of 70s and 80s television, he has very much been part of my life. I really enjoy those actors who play the witness or friend or sister of someone on one episode of television, and if you watch a lot of TV (like I do), these people stand out, and you get the idea they must be easy or fun to work with, because you see them throughout the years even on the same show.



Which brings me to the point of all this: I hate that Ron Glass died. But still with us? Nathan Fillion. He was just such a person who stuck out to me on... what? Probably a 90s? TV show called Two Guys, a Girl and a Pizza Place.



Not only am I happy Nathan Fillion is in the world because I loved every character on Firefly, and really none more than his, and also really like Castle, Dr. Horrible, and a million other projects where he makes life infinitely funnier and brighter; Nathan Fillion seems to be constantly raising money for charities. Right now, it's for a children's museum in L.A. This will be especially exciting to my daughter, who not only loves Nathan Fillion with the rabidity of the young, but currently works in a children's museum (finger on the pulse, that guy). He appears at comic cons, does cross promotion with the Supernatural guys, and generally gives of himself to fans in a good-humored way I get exhausted just thinking about. It's a way I see more and more as the comic con mentality becomes more the way of entertainment in an ultra-crowded sphere, and I love it.

When I started watching Castle, I did so because of Nathan Fillion, by now having fallen in love with Firefly (and stopped saying, "Johnny!" every time I saw him). But there was someone there who, like Fillion and Ron Glass, caught my attention over the years: Ruben Santiago-Hudson. I started researching Hudson, and found Lackawana Blues, collecting an amazing cast of these faces I had seen here and there in a phenomenal, award-winning play Santiago-Hudson wrote about his own childhood. He's won an Emmy, a Tony and a bunch of other awards over the years.



We lost one very good, beautiful, familiar, comforting face. But here are two we still have to celebrate.

P.S. I also want to say that I really miss Julius Carry. The man was in classics of comedy, martial arts and every TV show known to man or woman (but not Designing Women, dammit) before running a Pizza Place. I'll always have a special place in my heart for Lord Bowler.

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