MEMORIES, JOKES AND RESPECT MARK FUNERAL SERVICE FOR 13 YEAR OLD MATTIE STEPANEK

Poet, peacemaker and precocious teen Mattie J.T. Stepanek was laid to rest in Maryland today in a ceremony befitting an icon, while people across the nation continued to pay tribute and celebrate the 13-year-old MDA National Goodwill Ambassador’s remarkable life and spirit.

Celebrities, Mattie’s friends and loved ones, and other admirers made up the thousands who gathered at St. Catherine Laboure Catholic Church in Wheaton, Md., to remember, honor and laugh at memories of Mattie, who wowed the world with his message of peace, hope and courage.

Former President Jimmy Carter delivered the eulogy for Mattie, with whom he’d enjoyed a friendship since the two met in 2002 and bonded over their passion for peacemaking.

Carter said he’d traveled to 122 foreign countries and met kings and queens, but Mattie was “the most extraordinary person I ever met.”

Carter also talked about how the youngster had teased and consoled him when Mattie’s wildly popular “Heartsongs” poetry books rose higher on the best-seller charts than Carter's own books.

CELEBRITY ADMIRERS
Famed talk show host Oprah Winfrey was among mourners who spoke about Mattie before the funeral mass. Other speakers were Jann Carl, “Entertainment Tonight” correspondent and member of MDA’s Board of Directors; and Dr. Murray M. Pollack of Children’s Hospital Pediatric Intensive Care Unit in Washington, where Mattie spent several months.

Also in attendance were actor Sean Astin, who starred in the “Lord of the Rings” films (among Mattie’s favorites), TV talk show host Montel Williams, and Harold Schaitberger, general president of the International Association of Fire Fighters (IAFF).

Winfrey said she often swapped e-mails with Mattie after the two struck up a friendship when he first appeared on her show in 2001.

She joked about how Mattie “volunteered” his advice about her plans for retirement after 20 years in television. Mattie told her it wasn’t a good idea and that she should reconsider — a decision she ultimately agreed with.

Carl, who got to know Mattie when he appeared live on the 2002 Jerry Lewis MDA Telethon, remarked that she felt she’d “met a real angel” and that Mattie was someone that “God had given back to the earth.” She also read “Ode to Mattie” written by MDA National Chairman Jerry Lewis, who couldn’t attend the services because of health issues.

In today’s ceremony, Carl’s daughter, Katherine Sears, carried Mattie’s second poetry book, “Journey Through Heartsongs.”

Also during the service, teenage singing sensation and MDA National Youth Chairman Billy Gilman performed the song “For Our World.” The song was from the album “Music Through Heartsongs” that the two teens collaborated on last year and sets Mattie’s words to music.

During all the events, Jeni Stepanek, Mattie’s mom, was accompanied by her son’s loyal service dog, Micah.

The day was marked with tributes in connection with Mattie’s service to MDA. Gestures and ceremonial touches were especially visible from members of the IAFF and Harley-Davidson motorcycle enthusiasts, both stalwart supporters of MDA and organizations that were dear to Mattie.

Mourners lined the streets leading to the church, many carrying signs that read “We Love You, Mattie” and “God Bless You, Mattie” as Mattie’s casket passed by on a fire truck.

The casket was covered with Harley-Davidson and fire fighter bumper stickers, and draped with a United Nations flag.

Hundreds of parked Harley-Davidson motorcycles also lined the streets leading to the church, which had been closed to traffic for the event.

Two fire trucks were parked at the entrance of the Gate of Heaven Cemetery with their ladders extended into an arch, with an American flag hanging at the top between them. A fire fighter honor guard was present outside the church after the service.

At the graveside, dozens of balloons were released into the sky, with cards attached carrying wishes written by campers from a nearby MDA summer camp that Mattie had attended.

The balloons are a tradition of the campers, who have neuromuscular diseases and live in the Baltimore-Washington area. Mattie’s camp counselor Devin Dressman spoke at the graveside service. Mattie was laid to rest next to his three siblings who died in early childhood.

Then, a single balloon with a blank card meant for Mattie was released into the sky, so he might make his own wish.

INTERNATIONAL IMPACT

While solemn ceremony was forefront in Maryland, the ripples of Mattie’s impact and measures of his fame continue to be seen and felt across the nation.

Three helicopters from the major television networks buzzed overhead while covering the memorial events, and dozens of media satellite and microwave trucks were at the scene.

Comments and reactions to Mattie’s life, message, and his passing have poured into MDA’s Web site, www.mdausa.org, from around the world. The site has seen more than 50,000 visits since his death on June 22.

The 2004 Jerry Lewis MDA Telethon, Sept. 5-6, will be dedicated to Mattie, and MDA employees nationwide observed a moment of silence at 11 a.m. in every U.S. time zone to honor his memory.

Some of the most heartfelt words about this remarkable boy came from his mother, Jeni Stepanek, in an e-mailed message to MDA in memory of her son.

“You are my best friend, and I always have been and always will be proud of you, my son. Thank you for the coffee, the foot massages, the snuggles, the conversations, the inspiration, the motivation, the laughter, the tears, the prayers, the dreams you shared, and for the gift of celebrating life,” she wrote.

Memoirs of a Banana Republican:

Jerry’s Kids
Luis Gonzalez
September 4, 2001

I just took some time off. Not from my day job mind you, but from the word processing program, and that annoying, thin black line, blinking at the corner of an empty screen.

During my sabbatical, I was far from surprised, but nevertheless delighted at the expected; a most talented treatise from a most talented man made my absence barely noticeable. He calls me his friend, which is a treasure I hold dear, then he proceeds to tell the whole world every intimate detail that I’ve ever confessed to him about my life in order to get some laughs.

I think I just figured out why Howard Stern plays pre-recorded shows when he goes on vacation.

In all seriousness, the Second Banana was no such thing, but rather, and as stated by a poster, just a different banana from the same bunch. Thank you my friend, Van Williams thanks you as well, it was the most press that he’s gotten in years.

It was a lot of fun, watching someone else going through the motions of “being” the Banana Republican, I got a certain voyeuristic thrill from doing it, something akin to logging on the Internet in the middle of the night, to watch a webcam broadcast of the Big Brother 2 contestants sleeping, and yes, I have watched several of the new “reality-based” television shows, I find them both fascinating and compelling.

Some people say that the father of all reality-based television was MTV’s “The Real World”, others point to Allen Funt and his “Candid Camera” show, I don’t agree with them, I believe the title belongs to Jerry Lewis, and his Labor Day Muscular Dystrophy Marathon. I liked the live and loosely scripted aspect of the show, and back when I was in college, I would literally try to stay up all night with Jerry, I didn’t make it once; the beer may have had something to do with it.

I didn’t watch it because of the entertainment, which was spotty at best, nor did I watch it out of curiosity as to how much would be collected each year, it was a given that last year’s figure would be surpassed, I watched to see if Jerry would make it to the end. I watched every year.

Jerry made it every time of course, at the end, he stood there, ragged and bleary-eyed, holding on to that year’s poster child and crying his eyes out as the band blared “What The World Needs Now Is Love”, and the counter rolled into a dollar figure surpassing the previous year’s tally, then Jerry faced the camera, hoarse, tired, and overcome with emotion, making his way through his signature song one more time; one more time for the folk in the Coliseum, who cheered wildly at the sight of the bedraggled gladiator, survivor of yet one more bout with the lions.

There were magical moments along the way, moments that will live in the memories of all who stayed up late enough, or got up early enough, to have been there. There was Frank Sinatra, the Chairman of the Board himself, surprising Jerry “in the wee small hours of the morning” in 1976 by dragging a slightly inebriated Dean Martin unto the stage, effectively ending a twenty-year feud, and re-uniting what I will always consider to be one of the greatest comedy team of all times. It was without a doubt, what television was supposed to be all about.

But it was always Jerry’s kids that made the show unforgettable, their presence giving meaning and heart to the telethon. I remember one particular child, bent, and twisted, his body ravaged by the cruel attack of the disease, talking to Jerry right before the year’s final total was to be announced. Jerry, with the bags under his eyes and the ever-present microphone, comes down on one knee next to the diminutive wheelchair and asks him what he would wish for if he had a single wish to be granted, what was it that he wanted most in the whole world, the child, with eyes so bright and alive, simply said, “I would wish to stand up.”

But Jerry only put the show on once a year, and the masses liked the entertainment. There where 363 more opportunities each year to capture our imaginations, and the networks knew a good thing when they saw it, they needed something new to titillate us, and feed our voyeuristic needs.

They gave us news magazines, Nightline, the phrase “Based On A True Story”, docudramas and Charles Kuralt; we ate it up. We sat and watched news like we’d never sat and watched news before; the war was brought home nightly, body counts and places like Laos on our screens. The same news brought us the images of our children rioting in the streets of the nation, protesting a war they didn’t believe in, and the images of other children coming home in caskets, killed in a far-off jungle, for a poorly-defined reason. We watched fascinated from our bedrooms and living rooms until the body counts became the news, and the caskets became background.

All the while, Jerry’s kids struggled to stand up.

It was in the mid-seventies that Jerry brought a young girl on stage with him, walking painfully with the help of metal braces on her legs, holding on to crutches that strapped themselves to her arms. She walked to Jerry, with so much effort and determination showing on her young face, that you somehow KNEW that this young girl would be the one, she would beat the cruel disease, and the story would have a happy ending. Jerry knelt holding back tears, the band blared the opening strains of “You’ll Never Walk Alone”, and I cried, I’ll confess to it, alone in my dorm room, watching Jerry sing, I cried.

In America, 97% of homes had a television set, and in 1977, national “Turn Off the TV” week is a flop, that was the last year that I watched Jerry, and his kids. That was the decade that brought us the televised Watergate hearings, HBO, a Presidential resignation, “super” stations, and controversial television, with a gay man on “Soap”, and an abortion in “Maude”. Television was a mirror on which we watched our own reflection, and we didn’t like what we were seeing. America was humiliated in the eyes of the world, as satellite images of burning American flags and beaten hostages brought the decade of the seventies to a dismal close, images broadcast by the newest addition to televised media, the 24-hour news network was born in 1979 with the debut of CNN.

It was on one of those close-of-the-decade shows that Seals and Croft performed for Jerry’s kids, I was sitting at a half-empty bar, holding an empty glass, and contemplating an empty life, when one of the regulars reminded the barkeep that Jerry was on. The singing duet finished their number and introduced an unknown singer/songwriter, a young man rolled out; body dwarfed and twisted, and sang with the voice of an angel. He sang about hope and about a better tomorrow. I put that empty glass down, and did what Jerry’s kids where still struggling to do, I stood up and walked out that door.

The Eighties watched American pride return to the White House, We watched a president get shot, a Royal wedding, Live AID, the Challenger explosion, and the Iran-Contra hearings. We closed the decade watching live coverage of an earthquake in San Francisco and the fall of a wall, and an empire. We also watched tanks crush the spirit of Democracy in Tiananmen, and thanked God that it could never happen here.

Ninety-three million American homes have televisions as the 90’s arrive; our insatiable hunger for human drama finds a willing partner in cable television. Court Television, Congressional Span, Oprah-Springer-Sally-Montel-Rickie rule the airwaves. We watch the first real-time televised war, and the trial of the century almost non-stop; I survived Hurricane Andrew; sitting up all night in a bathroom with the door nailed shut watching the storm raging outside on my portable, battery powered television.

In a few short decades, we had been transformed into a nation of watchers. A generation better informed and more in touch with the current events of the world than any in the history of man, our reality being fed to us via the ever-growing screens of today’s televisions, as we sit and feed the beast inside us; that beast that secretly smiles at the sight of someone else’s misfortunes, and who, while professing concern and empathy for the victim of one of life’s many cruel happenstances, revels in that “better thee than me” mind-set.

We sat and watched the tanks roll and crush men, women, and children in a small town in Texas, and knew then that it could happen here as well.

We sat and watched a President commit perjury under oath, and do so with impunity, undaunted by the thought of repercussions.

We watched our armed forces reduced to the role of butchers, bombing innocent men, women, and children to detract attention from that lying President.

We watched a Justice Department soil the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the spirit of the Founders in a pre-dawn raid on a home in Little Havana. We see those raids still today, being carried out in the name of the War On Drugs.

And each and every time, with each and every one of these affronts to the Republic, I knew that there was no way that we would not rise as a nation, and say “enough”! But we didn’t.

We sat and watched all these things, this nation of 258 million, and all the while Jerry, and his kid’s rolled on, with hope in their hearts.

I have a date tonight; I will stay up into the wee small hours of the night with Jerry, seventy-five year old Jerry, and watch this, his thirty-six year hosting the MDA Telethon, a labor of love that so far has raised over one billion dollars for some kids who simply want to stand up.

The news reports say that Jerry is stepping back, that the event is too much for him. I don’t know how many more times I’ll have this opportunity, so I’ll spend the night with an old friend and forget about the mess that we have made of our nation.

And I’m calling that phone number flashing across the bottom of the screen. I need to help. I need to help because I have faith in Jerry’s Kids; I believe that they will rise up out of their chairs long before this nation will.

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