(Photo: Matthew Hinton/The Advocate)
Mickey Easterling had a larger than life personality. That hasn't changed a bit since she died last week. She was a philanthropist and bon vivant known throughout New Orleans. Easterling was noted for her wild hats and for often carrying a champagne glass in one hand and a cigarette holder in the other. So that is precisely how undertakers arranged her body at her funeral this Tuesday.
John Pope writes about her in The Times-Picayune:
“She loved the limelight. She loved the attention,” said her daughter, Nanci Myke Easterling. “She was flamboyant. She had flair. She was outrageous.” […]
In a 1998 interview for The Times-Picayune, David Cuthbert wrote that the walls of Ms. Easterling’s home office were hung with portraits of herself by George Febres, Douglas Bourgeois, Jean-Jacques Giraud and Douglas Johnson. Out by the pool, Cuthbert said, was a nude sculpture that, Ms. Easterling said, was “the quintessential me – shoes, hat, cigarette and Champagne glass.”
For people who might not have known her, Ms. Easterling gave a hint to her saucy personality by frequently wearing a pin spelling out “#1 Bitch” in sparkling stones.
“Wearing that pin all the time was so my mother,” her daughter said. “She was proud of the fact that she was aggressive and in-your-face tough.”
-via American Digest