A wake for a stand-up kind of guy

This post is courtesy of my sister Lori, who clued me into this news item. It's a couple of months old, and maybe you've already heard of it. But still, it's a good one!

Back on July 8, New Orleans vocalist, bass drummer and assistant leader of the Treme Brass Band "Uncle" Lionel Batiste died of cancer. He was 81. If you watch the HBO show Treme, you may recognize him as the skinny guy with the big drum, one of the acts regularly featured on the show.  It was reported that Batiste used his drum to stay afloat in the floods after Hurricane Katrina.

Well, check this out. At his wake they had him all dressed in an upright position, wearing sunglasses and leaning on a light post...

... while family and friends danced and played music all around.

Now, I thought it was cool that we had a billboard of my father at his wake, but this is genius. Imagine the possibilities of standing up.  You're not a corpse; you're more like a work of Madame Tussaud! You could wear dangling earrings--they can't dangle if you're lying in a casket.  And if you have great legs, you can show them off right till the very end.  Brilliant.

As for me, I was thinking they could pose me in something like this:

Now we're talking about a party!

As Louis Charbonnet, proprietor of the Charbonnet-Labat-Glapion Funeral Home, told the New Orleans Times Picayune, "You have to think outside the box."