There’s no need for excuses anymore.
Members of the Dorothy Parker Society on Monday unveiled the headstone for writer Dorothy Parker’s grave, to celebrate both her birthday and the one-year mark since her cremains were buried in New York after spending 33 years in Baltimore.
Parker’s former grave marker in Baltimore bore the message “Excuse My Dust,” which she jokingly supplied as her desired epitaph in a Vanity Fair piece.
The new gravestone at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx is inscribed with an excerpt from one of Parker’s poems, “Epitaph For A Darling Lady”:
Leave for her a red young rose
Go your way and save your pity
She is happy for she knows
That her dust is very pretty
The American poet, writer, and critic is remembered as a founding member of the Algonquin Round Table and a symbol of Jazz Age sophistication. She was born in Long Branch, N.J., on Aug. 22, 1893 and lived most of her life in New York City, the area with which she is most closely associated.
Although she never had strong ties to Baltimore, Parker was buried in the city because she was a strong supporter of the civil rights movement and signed a will that left her estate to civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., even though she had never met him.
Parker died in 1967 and King was assassinated a year later. Following King’s death, his estate went to the NAACP, whose headquarters were at that point located at the Seton Business Park in Baltimore. Honoring Parker’s will, the NAACP buried her in 1988 on the grounds of its office building at 4805 Mount Hope Drive.
When the NAACP moved its headquarters to downtown Baltimore in 2019, Parker’s grave was left behind. The Dorothy Parker Society, led by president Kevin Fitzpatrick and working with Parker’s relatives, appealed to the NAACP’s leaders to allow her cremains to be moved to Woodlawn Cemetery, where her family had a burial lot for her all along, and the NAACP agreed.
Her cremains were secretly exhumed in August 2020 and transported to New York City for reburial on her birthday last year. But the COVID-19 pandemic prevented much of a gathering to mark the move, so the gravestone unveiling was scheduled for this summer.
The unveiling had originally been scheduled for Sunday, Parker’s birthday, but it was postponed because the cemetery was closed due to Hurricane Henri. The celebration was shifted to Monday, marking the end of a weekend-long “Parkerfest” that included two Dorothy Parker Walking Tours and a birthday party at the New York Distilling Co. in Brooklyn.
Funds for her gravestone were raised in part by the sale of Dorothy Parker T-shirts, featuring a drawing by Al Hirschfeld; and a limited edition batch of 250 bottles of – what else? — Dorothy Parker Round Table Reserve Gin from the New York Distilling Company.
I rather prefer her original epitath.