Column Chronicles: Obituary; Scarland Orlando, personality

Obituary: Scarland Orlando, personality

Frank Cotolo
November 20, 2025

Thank you, all of you, for your silence during the solumn ceremony remembering our friend Scarland Orlando. His death was a shock to at least fifty percent of the people who knew him - and that includes his family and extended family - and to one hundred percent to the pair of people who confessed they loved him.

A lot of the hate for Scarland was an expressio of jealousy. Not all but a lot. Because Scarland was naturally admired while doing anything and he was the first person in the history of entertainment to become a personality for doing things just once.

He never repeated anything he did. Not singing, dancing, lip reading, tightrope walking, playing a tuba or a guitar or a banjo, climbing a skyscraper, riding a bicycle through a wall of flames, eating a buffalo raw, marriage, dentistry, sky diving, skin diving, you name it and he did it. Once.

He went by many names. Those of us who were intimate with him knew him as Scarland Orlando but he always introduced himself to strangers with a new name. He appeared in public and had checking accounts under such names as Don Dee Doodle, Slippy McSlide, Henry Et Ah, Simonized Headboard, Weeping Bunnymaker, Frank Frankenscence, U.P. Daley, I. M. Sickendahed, Ollie Ollie Oxenfree, George Pillowface, P.P. Onaface, Kip Bender, Bennie Kipper, B.K. Busterfuse and those are merely some.

Scarland was the one kind of person all people dared not to be but secretly craved to become if only they wished to ruin their common lives. His lifestyle scared people and yet he met The Pope and His Holyness told Scarland that the second coming of Jesus Scarland could be all twelve of the next set of apostles.

These stories and more won't die with Scarland. But they will always have different bylines.

Thank you all for being here and as Scarland would say, now go home.

Frank Cotolo can be found hosting the talk and interview programme Cotolo Chronicles. You can send him an e-mail at this address: frank@148.ca.