The Passing of a Trio of Almost-Friends.

IN one of life's little coincidences, Gene Rayburn, Charlie Byrd and Madeline Kahn all wound up on the same page of The New York Times last week -- the obituary page.

Other than being celebrities with varying degrees of popularity, they really hadn't much in common. One was a TV game show host from the '60s and '70s, one was a jazz guitarist who popularized the bossa nova in this country, and one was an actress/singer best known for her antics in a few Mel Brooks films.

I actually knew these people. Not directly, but through fragments of life experiences that take on much greater meaning once you get past, say, 40 or 50. Death, of course, tends to be one of life's more evocative moments -- an opportunity to reflect not so much on the person but on where you were when you happened to discover that person.

Gene Rayburn goes back the furthest. I found it amazing to read that he died at 81; it didn't seem possible that the guy I remembered 30-plus years ago, with his dark, slicked-back hair and goofy grin, could have been that old.

He is probably best known for hosting the "Match Game," which I got to watch when I was home sick from school and my parents would wheel our old black-and-white set into my room. Rayburn would read from little cards and ask silly questions to contestants and a panel of show-biz types. Some of the questions would have double entendres that as a little kid I couldn't even begin to understand. He was a little like background music, but in the nicest sense: comforting, funny and a tad mischievous -- the kind of guy who might have played the devilish uncle.

I was a college freshman in Washington, D.C. when Charlie Byrd came into my life. Schooled in both classical and jazz technique, he segued in the early '60s to Latin rhythms -- and in particular the bossa nova -- an intricate musical style that was developed in Rio de Janeiro and popularized by the song, "The Girl From Ipanema."

It was hardly what most kids my age wanted to listen to in the early '70s. But I got lucky when I met a fellow freshman whose family had lived in Brazil for many years and whose tastes in music were similar to mine. Oblivious to the pounding of the Stones and Led Zeppelin across the dorm hail, we assembled a collection of Antonio Carlos Jobim, Stan Getz and the other bossa nova stars. Byrd was special because he had been a local boy and would regularly perform at several Washington clubs. The Times described him as unpretentious, which is how I remember those sessions. That, plus the music being just plain cool.

Madeline Kahn was the most well-known of the three, and while she had an extensive career in movies, theater and television, I mostly recall her homage to Marlene Diet-rich in "Blazing Saddles," in which she played Lili von Shtupp, the cynical stage star with the speech defect ("Oh, a wed wose! How womantic!").

The movie's best scene has her entertaining a rough-and-tumble cowpoke crowd during a Western stage show and singing about being "tired of playing game. ...Let's face it: I'm tired!" I really don't know where I saw "Blazing Saddles" when it first came out in 1974, or whom I saw it with. But I do remember tears rolling down my face at those "I'm tired" lines.

So now they're all gone, and while the obits would never quite put it this way, it's perhaps a testament to the power of celebrity that the lives of Rayburn, Byrd and Kahn can take on personal dimensions all their own. In their time, in their own way, they were my friends -- I'll try to remember them.

Mark Lacter is editor of the Business Journal.