Judy is a punk. Sheena is a punk rocker. And now there’s a gang of ducks and other woodland creatures having a dead man’s party on Dee Dee Ramone’s grave.
Rolling Stone reports that a small parade of waterfowl, squirrels, chipmunks, feral cats, swans, doves, and other animals are making daily pilgrimages to Dee Dee’s final resting place at Hollywood Forever Cemetery, leading some sort of fowl revival meeting at the grave of the bassist and prolific punk lyricist, who died much too soon at the age of 50 in 2002 in Hollywood.
This newly formed animal collective is the product of Pavlovian training by two local punkers themselves: actor and singer Coyote Shivers, and one of our own biggest heroes in the annals of alternative L.A. voices, punk musician, performer, and writer Pleasant Gehman.
Bored out of their brains during the pandemic, the partners just wanted something to do. With L.A.’s beaches and parks closed, they began hanging out among the lush lawns of the cemetery and feeding the ducks at Dee Dee’s headstone, including some domesticated birds that once belonged to a friend.
“We started calling them the Ramones ducks because they’re all black and they stick together and stood out like a gang and they’d run up to Dee Dee every day,” Shivers says, telling the magazine the ducks have been named Joey, Johnny, Tommy, Dee Dee, and Sheena.