Lots of people would kill to be featured in The New Yorker. Cheryl Horsfall simply had to die.
My lovely and witty friend Cheryl was recently profiled in the "Talk of the Town" section of this week’s New Yorker for not being dead. Apparently, in some Brazil-esque bureaucratic snafu the New York state government decided in 2005 that Cheryl was deceased. This led much amusement by all (including a mock-wake thrown in her apartment), until Cheryl was refused health insurance since she was legally pushing up daisies.
Getting someone in the state government to affirm that you are in-fact still among the living is not so simple, as Cheryl learned the hard way. “You’d think it would be the easiest thing in the world to make a call and fix, being dead or alive," Cheryl is quoted in the article. "But, even with all the services there are in New York, there’s no such hot line.” She finally got a hearing on April 12, 2006 — the Wednesday before Easter of all things.
Thankfully, the judge agreed that Cheryl was not dead yet. She walked out of the hearing chambers, like Lazarus, with a new lease on life.
(BTW the picture is of Cheryl and me preparing dinner at a mutual friend’s summer cottage in Vermont last summer.)