Yep. So sad.

Anyone watching her memorial service?

I am... got to say that casket spray was beautifully done. I do florist work, so I notice these kind of things.

Kevin Costner's comments about Whitney

http://www.accesshollywood.com/kevin-costner-tearfully-reveals-what-hed-say-to-bodyguard-co-star-whitney-houston-if-she-was-still-alive_article_60862

Bobby Brown continues to be an asshat

What's he doin?

He shows up at the funeral, with an entourage of 9 people, when he wasn't supposed to bring more than 3 people. So he left. He was probably just there for a photo op.

I love what CNN said, this is about Whitney and being remembered, it's not about him

Oh and Al Sharpton is utterly annoying

Edited February 18, 201213 yr by dragonflies

who the hell invited Al sharpton? I wonder if any of Whitney's friends from high school rated an invitation?

Cissy being ushered out of the church behind her daughter's casket is an image I won't soon forget.

Meh, CNN sucks. So far, this entire situation is making me not dislike Bobby Brown as much as I used too.

Reuters

Brown, who's currently on tour with his group New Edition, vacated the New Hope Baptist Church in Newark, N.J., after he was told that the church couldn't accommodate him and his entourage.

Also read: Whitney Houston Funeral: Stevie Wonder, R. Kelly Perform; Kevin Costner Speaks

The Rev. Jesse Jackson, who was in attendance at Houston's funeral, told CNN that Brown and his entourage of "four or five people" took seats in the front row, but were told that the row was reserved for family only. They were asked to move, Jackson said, but there wasn't room at the invitation-only service to seat them elsewhere.

"That was a very difficult moment for all of us; we wanted him to stay," Jackson said. "It seems they could have accommodated him better than they did."

The Rev. Al Sharpton, also in attendance, tweeted from the site that he attempted to keep the peace during the dispute.

Also read: Bobby Brown on Ex-Wife Whitney Houston: "You Have to Move On"

"I am at Whitney's funeral. I spoke with Bobby Brown trying to calm him down and not distract from the services," Sharpton wrote. "Today is about Whitney!"

Sharpton softened his stance in a tweet following the funeral.

"We are out of the service," Sharpton wrote. "I don't want anyone distorting Bobby Brown. He has shown love and respect today. Stop hatin'."

Sharpton reiterated his support for Brown to CNN after the funeral, saying, "Bobby did nothing but show love and respect for the memory of Whitney and his daughter ... I spoke to Bobby, he said all he wanted to do was show respect and love."

In a statement, Brown said that he was asked to move on three separate occasions, and prevented him from seeing his daughter, Bobbi Kristina, at the funeral.

"I doubt Whitney would have wanted this to occur," Brown's statement reads, according to CNN. "I will continue to pay my respects to my ex-wife the best way I know how."

Brown's tour takes him to Uncasville, Ct., on Saturday night. Coincidentally, the tour will bring Brown back to Newark on Sunday.

Cissy being ushered out of the church behind her daughter's casket is an image I won't soon forget.

Yeah, IWALY blasting with the mother being assisted out the church behing the casket If I hadn't watched the last hour recorded instead of live, that probably would have made me cry.

CeCe, he's amazing, and R. Kelly's singing were other moments that almost made me tear up.

OTOH, the sister in law's Mother Teresa comparison was just way OTT.

The service was beautiful.

Stevie Wonder's singing made me cry.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibsS05cBFZA

"OTOH, the sister in law's Mother Teresa comparison was just way OTT."

LOL, IKR? She had the thankless job of "reading the church papers" so to speak, the very clinical sounding acknowledgments and thanks.

Alicia Keys looked so good but she kind of annoyed me when she spoke.

I genuinely worry about the toll this will take on Cissy. I don't know why my heart goes straight to her when BK lost her mom. I think it has something to do with the many times I saw her in the audience with BK on her lap or at her side when Whitney was making a talk show appearance. Especially when controversial subjects would come up and I just had the sense that Cissy was really going through it, knowing first hand what the real deal was behind the scenes and praying for the best for her daughter. This is not a "new" problem for her and it seems like she's spent the last twenty odd years fretting over her daughter between the moments of happiness. That is a great emotional load, and to have it end this way, which is really just the beginning of a life mourning her child. So sad.

Edited February 19, 201213 yr by SFK

I don't know why my heart goes straight to her when BK lost her mom.

Yeah, no parents expects to outlive their kid and on top of that Cissy probably did spend much of the past 20 or more years fearing just that - that she'd ultimately lose her kid to her demons. I wasn't really thinking about the toll this would take on her until that moment today. Her looking so fragile behing her daughters casket. I think she'll pull through for her granddaughter if nothing else. Hopefully Bobbi doesn't give in to her parents demons and put more of a burden on this woman.

I wish CNN had just cut to something else after the service was done. It really rubbed me the wrong way how they were commenting on it as if it was this year's royal wedding.

CNN starts out okay with a story and then they go OTT before you can count to ten. It becomes a redundant one-note mess.

ETA:

From last Sunday's New York Times...

A Voice of Triumph, the Queen of Pain

Whitney Houston died as a cautionary tale, but the most painful cautionary tales are about people who were heroes once.

That is how she arrived in the mid-1980s, a flawless vocalist singing impeccable songs and singlehandedly inserting gospel and classic soul theatrics into mainstream pop. She was a sunbeam — radiant, perspective altering, impossible to touch.

When her greatest years were behind her, she remained in the public eye as something thornier — a drug addict and a casualty of the tabloid and reality-television era, ill-equipped for ever-increasing levels of scrutiny. Ms. Houston’s fall attracted so much notice because she had so far to go, down from the clouds into the abyss.

The bottom finally came on Saturday, when Ms. Houston, 48, was found in her room at the Beverly Hilton, in Beverly Hills, Calif., a few hours before the annual pre-Grammy gala held at the hotel by Clive Davis, the Arista Records founder who discovered and helped mold her into one of the pre-eminent pop stars of the last 30 years.

Ms. Houston was R&B’s great modernizer, slowly but surely reconciling the ambition and praise of the church with the movements and needs of the body and the glow of the mainstream. Her voice was clean and strong, with barely any grit, well suited to the songs of love and aspiration that were the breakthrough hits from her first two albums, “Whitney Houston” and “Whitney,” the post-quiet-storm ballads “You Give Good Love” and “Saving All My Love for You”; and the naïve, bopping, flush-of-love dance tracks “I Wanna Dance With Somebody (Who Loves Me)” and “So Emotional.” Only a few of her 1980s hits — “Didn’t We Almost Have It All” and “Where Do Broken Hearts Go” chief among them — explored love’s dark side.

Hers was a voice of triumph and achievement, and it made for any number of stunning, time-stopping vocal performances: her version of Dolly Parton’s “I Will Always Love You,” from the soundtrack to “The Bodyguard,” which topped the Billboard singles chart for 14 weeks; her dazzling “Star-Spangled Banner,” sung before the 1991 Super Bowl; and huge, authoritative songs like “Greatest Love of All” and “One Moment in Time,” which sounded as if they could have been national anthems too.

Ms. Houston’s signature was to let her Brobdingnagian voice soar unfettered. From a lesser vocalist that would have been a gimmick, but from her it was par for the course, just a freakishly gifted athlete leapfrogging everyone around her.

She was, alongside Michael Jackson and Madonna, one of the crucial figures to hybridize pop in the 1980s, though her strategy was far less radical than that of her peers. Jackson and Madonna were by turns lascivious and brutish and, crucially, willing to let their production speak more loudly than their voices, an option Ms. Houston never went for.

Also, she was less prolific than either of them, achieving most of her renown on the strength of her first three solo albums and one soundtrack, released from 1985 to 1992. If she was less influential than they were in the years since, it was only because her gift was so rare, so impossible to mimic. Jackson and Madonna built worldviews around their voices; Ms. Houston’s voice was the worldview. She was someone more to be admired, like a museum piece, than to be emulated.

She also had a stiff backbone, barely conceding to the changing times. She didn’t much bother with hip-hop, even as it usurped soul music’s place at the core of black pop and as everyone around her adapted: singers like Mariah Carey, one of her few vocal equals, who became a willing hip-hop co-conspirator; or Mary J. Blige, who had it in her DNA from the start of her career.

Instead, Ms. Houston’s 1998 comeback album “My Love Is Your Love” — late-period Houston was forever in a comeback; this was just the first — was modern only in incremental ways. Ms. Houston’s real progress on this album was mood: for the first time, she was testy, aggrieved, lashing out. “Heartbreak Hotel” and “It’s Not Right but It’s Okay” saw her access a viciousness that had been all but absent to that point, whether because of Mr. Davis’s polishing influence, or because of the polite side of the gospel sound she inherited.

Maybe its emergence had something to do with the volatility of her personal life. In 1992 she married the R&B bad boy and former New Edition front man Bobby Brown, and later, after they divorced, she painted the marriage as a chaotic one. It certainly read as a study in opposites, both in demeanor and ideas about R&B: Ms. Houston austere and regal, Mr. Brown louche and sweaty.

They lasted 15 years as a married couple, a period that coincided with declines in the quality and frequency of Ms. Houston’s music. But she remained a star, even as the meaning of that role changed. Her meltdowns garnered as much attention as her hits once did. This was the period in which Whitney Houston, the voice, was eclipsed by Whitney Houston, the sound bite.

There was her memorable and rambunctious acknowledgment of Mr. Brown from the stage of the 2000 Grammy Awards as “the original king of R&B.” The reality show “Being Bobby Brown,” which was on Bravo for one tumultuous season in 2005, showed the two sharing a love that was affectionate, tough, complex and sometimes outright ugly. It also spawned a catch phrase for Ms. Houston, “hell to the no,” an emphatic and disjointed way of expressing displeasure.

It made her an easy punch line. That show was the public’s longest sustained exposure to Ms. Houston in almost a decade, and the changes in her were striking. She looked not just lean but gaunt, and she was both a robust and erratic presence. It was the sort of reality that rarely makes it to reality television.

TV had been unkind to her before. Asked about her drug habit by Diane Sawyer in a 2002 interview, she was evasive, uncomfortably intense and sloppy: “I want to see the receipts,” she said impertinently. By the time she sat with Oprah Winfrey in 2009, her divorce from Mr. Brown complete, she was more forthcoming and self-aware, but still not quite steady. (In the mid-2000s Ms. Houston went to rehab at least twice, and she was in rehab again as recently as last year.)

Coming from someone who was once pure music royalty, these flashes of public instability were true jolts, completely at odds with her early vivacity. Maybe, beneath that old sheen, she was always so messy. But strangely her troubled later life finally gave her a title that her music never could: Whitney Houston, queen of pain, another throne no one could deny her.

I'm hearing reports that Bobby's "entourage" consisted of Whitney's Stepchildren. If so... then WTF, and who would have the gall to ask the ex-husband and children to move three times? After the third time, if I were Bobby... I would have said, "Is it ok if I go back and STAND in the back corner?" Or he should have said "Ask me to move one more time, and you'll have one hell of a mess on your hands".