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Tammy Faye Messner, 1942-2007

Monday, July 23, 2007 04:58 AM

tags: Celebrity, Recently Dead, Tammy Faye: Death Defying

While all of us were busy getting our weekend started, Tammy Faye Messner was quietly succumbing to the cancer she'd been bravely fighting – and at one time wrestled into submission – for 10 years. She died at home near Kansas City, Missouri, on Friday, and her ashes were interred on Saturday in a remote part of Kansas at the Kansas-Oklahoma border. She was 65. Larry King, who was asked by Tammy Faye's family to make the announcement on Saturday, said she had requested there be a party in Palm Springs after she died. "She wanted it to be a celebration," he said, which is typical of the vibrant not-quite-five-feet-tall dynamo who survived scandal and heartbreak as a TV evangelist to become a beloved pop-culture icon, all the while living an exemplar life according to the Lord's Prayer – especially that part about "as we forgive those who trespass against us." Of course, Tammy put it in secular terms: "If life hands you lemons, make lemonade." Last week, on her final television appearance, she told Larry King, “I want my funeral to be a real happy time. I want everybody laughing and remembering how crazy I was.”

At World of Wonder we're especially saddened by her death because, after working with her on two documentary series, The Eyes of Tammy Faye and Tammy Faye: Death Defying, we came to know and love her as the kind of person we should all aspire to be: honest, loving, forgiving, and a helluva broad. (Yes, to be more like Tammy, we'd even contemplate a sex change.) We think that by just knowing her, a little bit of what she was has rubbed off on all of us. Really, was there ever a finer, more fabulous human being? "When I was a little girl," she once said, "I used to pray, 'Dear God, please don't let my life be boring. I found that you have to be careful what you pray for."

Today, we're going to give the WOW Report over to Tammy Faye, posting (in no particular order) some of the clips we've archived over the years. Even though she wouldn't want you to cry, you're going to. And it's OK. We are.