Walter White Funeral On Saturday

My sister and nephew were among the many mourners for Walter White.  Here, Jackamoe Buzzell addresses the crowd on Saturday (Albuquerque Journal photo).

The Albuquerque Journal reports:

The first hint that the service Saturday at Sunset Memorial Park wasn’t a typical funeral came when eulogist Michael Flowers got cheers when he spoke of the dearly departed.

Another giveaway came from the prominent bright colors, T-shirts, sandals and ubiquitous black pork pie hats that broke up the typical formal black.

The funeral for Walter White, the fictional chemistry teacher turned meth kingpin in AMC’s television drama “Breaking Bad,” drew about 200 mourners to the cemetery after a funeral procession that rolled 80 cars deep down Second Street in the North Valley.

Leading the procession were a few Bernalillo County Sheriff’s deputies, followed by a tan, beat-up RV made famous in the show, a hearse and then around 80 diehard fans. The procession shut down streets and took 10 minutes to pass.

...The funeral benefited Albuquerque’s Health Care for the Homeless and was to be broadcast to millions of viewers via YouTube. However, YouTube cut the stream 15 minutes before the funeral after Sony and AMC determined it was featuring some copyrighted material, according to an employee working on the live stream.

The lack of eavesdropping YouTube viewers made for an intimate evening at the park near Menaul and Edith, which was cast in golden light just before the sun set.

“We all need closure,” said eulogist and “Breaking Bad” set decorator Michael Flowers to the assembled mourners. “… The show is over – and what the hell are we going to do on Sunday nights?”

Nick Gerlich came to the funeral from Amarillo, Texas, and showed a couple of friends more than 40 sites from the show, culminating in White’s funeral.

He said the funeral gives him “closure, I guess, in a strange kind of way. A way of paying respects to someone you feel like you know really well.”

Other mourners came from as far away as Switzerland, Mexico City and Ireland.

...Vernon’s Steakhouse created an endowment fund to raise money for Albuquerque’s Health Care for the Homeless, and attendees were asked to pay their respects to White through donations ranging from $10 to $10,000.

Tickets for the funeral’s nighttime reception at the speakeasy-style steakhouse were $100 per person, and vendors had everything from chicken-and-waffle-flavored chocolate to the original Albuquerque Journal papers featuring Walter White’s obituary. Every guest received two drinks made with blue ice, and some attendees smoked cigars on plush couches outside in front of a live band. Fans of the show from Boston and Rhode Island attended the reception.

...Sunset Memorial Park officials agreed to hold the funeral only after being assured that they could remove the memorial, a square tombstone to be installed away from real graves, should it become an attraction.

Steve alerts me to another report on CNN:

Yet for some who have laid actual family members to rest at Sunset Memorial Park, the fake grave site is, at the least, a nuisance.

"It's going to be difficult to look up and see something going on over there that really shouldn't," resident Manuel Arellano told KOAT. "This is too much. I bring my family here to visit their grandpa and my wife to visit her dad ... What's going to happen come Christmas, come Thanksgiving on those hard days for me and my family? It's hard to come when we miss my father-in-law so much. It's going to be hard to see people over there decorating something for somebody that wasn't real."

More than 900 people who agree with that sentiment have signed an online petition asking Sunset Memorial Park to remove the grave site, which includes a headstone. Officials at the cemetery told the Albuquerque Journal that the mock burial was in the clear as long as the cemetery could remove the grave if it became a distraction for others.

...For now, it seems the petitioners have won out. According to KOAT, the AMC character's fake grave has been moved, and the headstone is not being kept at the cemetery.

The situation there is uncomfortable in Albuquerque at the moment. Apparently a lot of people took offense at the idea of burying a fictional character – mostly people who have folks buried at the grave yard. The organizers (led by Jackamoe Buzzell, whose last name is the same as my mother’s, and to whom I may be distantly-related) secreted the headstone in order to keep it from being stolen, after several threats were apparently made. The article implies the ‘casket’ itself has been moved too.

On Saturday afternoon, thousands of people around the world, including myself, waited on YouTube to view livestream video from the funeral. Without notice of any sort, Sony Pictures asserted copyright privilege and blocked the broadcast. We were completely out of luck. Sony has also moved against ‘Bathing Bad’, a local store selling bath salts.

Since Sony seems to be on a corporate jihad, my sister wants to safeguard our little descanso too, lest the cross we made get taken by corporate goons, or local cemetery goons, or just goons in general. I refuse. I think Sony is going after the money and won’t bother with us. But my sister is definitely worried, given the current atmosphere.