General Discussion

Omaha Steve

(99,584 posts) Tue May 26, 2015, 10:45 PM May 2015

Not long ago the DU helped raise $ for somebody sick...Patrice Diane Messina

https://www.facebook.com/alan.brennert/posts/10204565745559719

By Alan Brennert,

I have lost two cherished friends on the same day. First Joy Thomas; and now Patrice Diane Messina. I met Patrice in 1984 on THE TWILIGHT ZONE, when she was interviewing for the position of assistant to Supervising Producer James Crocker. I was pecking away on a spare typewriter and Patrice looked at me and said, "You're the fastest two-finger typist I've ever seen." I laughed. Patrice made me laugh a lot in the next 30 years. She was hired, and soon also became a writer for the series when we bought her first produced teleplay--the lovely and poignant "Grace Note." It was a story about loss, and Patrice (and her brother Jay) had known their share of it, losing both parents in their early 20s. For all that, though, she was a bubbly, bright, sweet and generous soul. When I once needed to go to the emergency room, Patrice picked me up and stayed with me until 4 in the morning, even though I told her to go, I'd get a cab back home. She wouldn't do it. That was so who she was. She later worked as David E. Kelley's script supervisor on PICKET FENCES and wrote a script for the show, which regrettably was never produced. In 2001 she was awarded a Disney-ABC Writing Fellowship for TV Drama, and enjoyed a long association with Disney Animation as a production supervisor--the job she held when she was diagnosed with cancer a few years ago. Patrice fought the disease bravely, despite it finishing a screenplay about one of her passions, the doomed romance between 40s movie stars Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy. Her cancer took a sudden and irreversible turn this weekend--just when she was going to be released from Cedars Sinai after being treated for pneumonia--and her family and friends all gathered by her side yesterday to say goodbye, to tell her how much we loved her and how many lives she had touched in her too-short 63 years. Goodbye, dear friend. I hope with all my heart that Rhett, Ashley, and Charlie are greeting you right now, barking and licking your face in joy. Their gain is our loss.