Obituaries of 2006

Mark Steyn has profiles of some of the luminaries we lost in 2006. Many of them are too obscure for me to appreciate, but they are all delivered as only Mark can. Here is an example:

MAUREEN STAPLETON, actress
Miss Stapleton didn’t make it to the grand old age of my old friend George Abbott, who died at the age of 107 while working on rewrites of The Pajama Game. Mister Abbott directed Miss Stapleton in a Broadway play a few decades back, when he was a whippersnapper in his 80s and she was half his age. A very vigorous fellow almost to the end of his life, he began an affair with his leading lady, and Miss Stapleton started regaling her girlfriends with rather more details than they wanted about octogenarian action. But she was insistent about his prowess in that particular department that at the end one of them responded: “Wow! Has he got an older brother?”