Larry Newsom’s “Brighter Side of Life”: A Celebration

A celebration of the life and times of the late Larry Newsom, Flagler Beach’s city manager for the past four years and one of local governments’ more colorful personalities, is taking place Friday evening at Tortugas Restaurant on State Road A1A in Flagler Beach, starting at 5 p.m.

Newsom died at 56 on Aug. 23 after a series of illnesses over the past year and a half. He’d been Flagler Beach’s manager since January 2016, and in government service for a couple of decades.




The celebration will feature a 10 minute video produced by Flagler Broadcasting’s David Ayres and Rich Savage, featuring Newsom in his various roles–husband to his wife Lisa, family man, friend, manager, impish lover of life (and a good drink), and golf.

The video ends on a full replay of Eric Idle’s “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life,” which first appeared in Monty Python’s “Life of Brian” in 1979, and opens with Idle, as one of the eight characters he plays in that movie, crucified alongside a host of other men on Golgotha, but still cheery. It begins:

Some things in life are bad
They can really make you mad
Other things just make you swear and curse
When you’re chewing on life’s gristle
Don’t grumble, give a whistle
And this’ll help things turn out for the best
And
Always look on the bright side of life
Always look on the light side of life

“We’re having kind of a fun tribute to Larry,” Ayres said on WNZF this morning. “Knowing him as well as I did, he doesn’t want everybody getting together and crying over him, so we’re calling it ‘The Brighter Side of Life,’ and we came up with that name, if you ever saw the Monty Python video, ‘Always Look on the Bright Side of Life,’ that was his favorite, he had it on his phone and during hurricanes” and disasters, “he would watch that and laugh.”

Here’s the full video tribute: