Letter to Newly Dead And Very Famous Musician From Heaven’s Talent Booker
Dear very famous and now dead mega star,
Welcome to heaven! It’s real! Pretty cool, right? Rest assured as one of Earth’s top musical acts you’ll enjoy the Premier Heavenly Experience. We base this on how many lives you touched, how much art you put forward that enriched the world, and how many cartoon drawings your fans made of you after you died. The specifics of this will all be sorted out during orientation, but just know the class system is in full effect here and you’ll reap the benefits as you have grown accustomed to when you were alive. Quick heads up, we’ve thus far been unable to eliminate jealousy from transferring over into your spirit brain. It was included by You-Know-Who, as a fail safe for humans to keep them on high alert and it sticks around even in Paradise. Rest assured we’ve been working on that with our supervisors and feel confident we will have a solution before the heat death of the Universe.
You may wonder why we’ve brought up the concept of jealousy in Eternity’s lobby. We do it only because we want to head off any issues before they blossom into PROBLEMS. What problems? Well, we know you’re itching to go jam with Jimi, Janis, or heck even Mozart. Every flip Facebook post about your death is already (prematurely!) touting your rousing performance with The Big Bopper or something, though to be brutally honest he’s been getting less press up here as of late. We want to let you know right now that “Happily Ever After” is not code for “free-for-all beer-bust at the moon tower!” There are rules. We can’t just throw you up as soon as you get here, how would that look to poor Franz Liszt who right now has a Sunday 3pm spot opening for Coltrane opening for Paul McCartney (YES! Pretty cool right? He pulled it off!) Right now we assume you are thinking, “Ok even if that’s true Paul would’ve died way after Franz, why is he headlining?” and we want to tell you:
A) TOLD YA jealousy was still in your heart!
B) He’s a Beatle, dude! They all get to the skip the line. Especially Ringo! The Big Cheese deemed “Octopus’s Garden” the most spiritual song ever written. Weird? Yep!
You’ll have ample opportunity to impress the right people, as time does not exist here. You can hit up some of our Heavenly open mics, Lenny Bruce runs a great one on Mondays that’s comedy and music, but it starts to peter out as it goes on so you want to get there early. There are some good exposure gigs we recommend, Tom Petty just did the GOP Screaming Torture Corner of Hell which is a tough one, but there is industry there sometimes and you get a free drink.
We do not encourage you to form a “supergroup” to try and skip the line either. Stevie Ray Vaughn, Richie Valens, Keith Moon, and Sonny Bono tried to pull it off and let me tell you, you think you know what a bitterly angry Beethoven is going to be like, but you just don’t know until you see it. Those guys are banned from The Main Room for 5000 years. They still play together, but they do it at this Applebee’s in Purgatory.
And that’s that! Welcome to heaven. Please grab a drink and know that despite this tough love we genuinely value you more than literally any other non-famous dead person!
Sincerely,
Pope John Paul II
