Gilda Radner was in the news this week -- because she wasn't considered "news" enough for some of the affiliates of Gilda's Club. That story had a less sad ending than originally thought, with only a small number of Clubs dropping Gilda's name and not the organization as a whole. But in an attempt to keep Gilda's relevance alive, here is a very heartwarming story told by Bill Murray, her friend and former Saturday Night Live castmate, about the last time the two saw each other at a party thrown by Laraine Newman. It's not a new story, but it's a nice one worth sharing (and remembering):

The whole Monty Python group was there, most of us from the show, a lot of other funny people, and Gilda. Gilda showed up and she’d already had cancer and gone into remission and then had it again, I guess. Anyway she was slim. We hadn’t seen her in a long time. And she started doing, “I’ve got to go,” and she was just going to leave, and I was like, “Going to leave?” It felt like she was going to really leave forever.

So we started carrying her around, in a way that we could only do with her. We carried her up and down the stairs, around the house, repeatedly, for a long time, until I was exhausted. Then Danny [Aykroyd] did it for a while. Then I did it again. We just kept carrying her; we did it in teams. We kept carrying her around, but like upside down, every which way -- over your shoulder and under your arm, carrying her like luggage. ...

We worked all aspects of it, but it started with just, “She’s leaving, I don’t know if you’ve said good-bye to her.” And we said good-bye to the same people ten, twenty times, you know.

And because these people were really funny, every person we’d drag her up to would just do like five minutes on her, with Gilda upside down in this sort of tortured position, which she absolutely loved. She was laughing so hard we could have lost her right then and there.

If you're not laugh-crying too hard, visit the Huffington Post Comedy Tumblr to read Murray's whole story (an excerpt from Live from New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live by Tom Shales and James Andrew Miller) about how it was impossible for Gilda Radner to not perform. Just because it's a really great story about Gilda Radner.

Photo credit: The First Five Years on Tumblr

(via Kottke)

The announcement by Gilda's Club Madison this week caused an uproar, even leading to petitions to convince Gilda's Club to reconsider taking Gilda Radner's name off of the organization that was formed in her memory. But now it appears that an eventual, full phase-out is not the case. Do some of us think that Gilda's story is worth telling to those who aren't familiar with her legacy of strength and creativity? Yes, indeed. And her book, It's Always Something, is a pretty good start.

Photo credit: Gilda's Club Grand Rapids

(h/t @ABHuret on Twitter)

You have probably heard by now that composer and EGOT -- that's a winner of the Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony awards -- Marvin Hamlisch has passed away at the age of 68 following a "sudden, brief illness." He worked for stage and screen, composing scores for movies including The Spy Who Loved Me and Sophie's Choice, and songs for shows like A Chorus Line and The Goodbye Girl. Most recently, he worked on the score for the Liberace biopic, Behind the Candelabra. But for many people, he made a huge impression with The Way We Were, which starred Barbra "Katie" Streisand and Robert "Hubble" Redford and was about "an outspoken Jewish girl with a big nose who goes to Hollywood with her beautiful blond husband and gets disgusted." At least that's how Gilda Radner told it when she performed "The Way We Were" in her show, Gilda Live. And I think it's a sweet way to remember a man who wrote songs that could bring a deeply romantic geek to tears. (via YouTube)