2016 has been a tough year to get through, especially if you’re a celebrity. In the past 12 months, we’ve lost notable figures from all walks of life, including Carrie Fisher, David Bowie, Prince, Abe Vigoda, George Michael, Alan Rickman, Alan Thicke, Muhammad Ali, Anton Yelchin, and Jose Fernandez, just to name a few. But as the calendar makes its highly anticipated march toward 2017, one South Carolina man is taking an unusual step to make sure 2016 doesn’t claim the internet’s favorite 94-year-old: Betty White.
Demetrios Hrysikos of Spartanburg, South Carolina, set up a GoFundMe page to raise money so he can travel to wherever the actress is in order to ward off the malicious spirit that is 2016. “Help 2016 catch these hands if it goes anywhere near Betty White!” Hrysikos wrote. “If she’s okay with it, I will fly to where ever Betty White is and keep her safe till Jan 1, 2017.”
The odds that Betty White will want this stranger to hold vigil over her until the stroke midnight on January 1, 2017 are pretty slim, so Hrysikos will be donating the actual funds raised to the Spartanburg Little Theater in order to, “help craft new stars of stage and screen to carry [the] mantle of the legends that have left [us] this year.”
So far, the GoFundMe campaign has raised more than $3500 from 341 people in just one day. 2016 may have been designed to seemingly crush our spirits, but the collective sense of humor (and irony) of the internet can never be extinguished.
[h/t: CNBC]
December 28, 2016 – 5:00pm