Teacher:In this task, you are given a text of many news articles seperated by special token "|||||". Your task is to summarize them.
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 NEW ORLEANS — All last week, people were calling Louis Charbonnet to find out how they might avoid lying down at their funerals. Funeral directors have called; so have people with their own requests, such as the woman who wanted to be seen for the last time standing over her cooking pot. 
  
 The calls started coming in to the Charbonnet-Labat Funeral Home during its June 12 viewing for Miriam Burbank, who died at 53 and spent her service sitting at a table amid miniature New Orleans Saints helmets, with a can of Busch beer at one hand and a menthol cigarette between her fingers, just as she had spent a good number of her living days. 
  
 Word of the arrangement began to spread, hundreds showed up, the news spread online, and now here was Mr. Charbonnet getting a call from a funeral director in Australia. 
  
 Ms. Burbank’s service was the second of its kind that Mr. Charbonnet had arranged, and the third in New Orleans in two years. But there have been others elsewhere, most notably in San Juan, P.R. Viewings there in recent years have included a paramedic displayed behind the wheel of his ambulance and, in 2011, a man dressed for his wake like Che Guevara, cigar in hand and seated Indian style. 
  
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 “I never said it was the first,” said Mr. Charbonnet, who mentioned the 1984 funeral of Willie Stokes Jr., a Chicago gambler known as the Wimp, who sat through his funeral services behind the wheel of a coffin made to look like a Cadillac Seville. 
  
 New Orleans, which has long boasted of its ability to put the “fun” in funeral, seems like the place where this kind of thing would catch on, and Mr. Charbonnet boasts that his 132-year-old funeral home is well known for its funeral parades. 
  
 “Couple weeks ago we even had a mariachi band in here,” he said, while checking text messages from people he referred to almost gleefully as his “haters” — apparently other funeral directors. They were criticizing such viewings as improper or even sacrilegious, a concern Mr. Charbonnet admitted was shared by his wife. But he said that he had gotten the O.K. from a local priest and that, besides, he was honoring family wishes. 
  
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 The phenomenon first appeared in Puerto Rico in 2008, four years before the first such funeral in New Orleans, with a 24-year-old murder victim whose viewing took place in his family’s living room, the body tethered against a wall. Angel Luis Pantojas’s funeral — called “muerto parao,” dead man standing — became an instant sensation. 
  
 Another murder victim, on a motorcycle, followed, along with the paramedic and the man dressed like Guevara. This year, a boxer’s body was arranged standing in a ring, and an elderly woman was propped up in her rocking chair. 
  
 The same funeral director, of the Marín Funeral Home in San Juan, arranged all of these. 
  
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 “It’s been a real boom in Puerto Rico,” said Elsie Rodríguez, vice president of the funeral home. “People have requested every type of funeral that could possibly come to mind. We have only done six so far, because the people who have requested the funerals have not died yet.” 
  
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 Ms. Rodríguez said the idea had come from Mr. Pantojas himself. His family has said that ever since he attended his father’s funeral at age 6, Mr. Pantojas had told relatives that he wanted to be viewed on his feet. 
  
 “This is not a fun or funny event; the family is going through a lot of pain,” Ms. Rodríguez said. With these kinds of arrangements, “the family literally suffers less, because they see their loved one in a way that would have made them happy — they see them in a way in which they still look alive.” 
  
 At first, some in Puerto Rico were against the services — which start around $1,700 — an opposition that Ms. Rodríguez attributed to “professional jealousy.” The Puerto Rico Legislature held hearings in which the Department of Health and other funeral directors weighed in. 
  
 “I thought it would propagate competitions for the most exotic funeral,” said Jorge Lugo, president of the Puerto Rico Funeral Home Association. “These people — not all of them, but some of these people who had these funerals — belonged to the underworld and had a life of fast money. It seemed to me that with these kinds of people doing this, there could be negative consequences.” 
  
 As it happened, Mr. Lugo said, the only other time a funeral home tried something unusual — the wake of a dog — it was a fiasco, as the dog had not been embalmed. A law passed in 2012 officially made the wakes with posed cadavers legal, “as long as the position is not immoral,” Mr. Lugo said. 
  
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 Such funerals are still quite rare in the United States, though not unheard-of: This year, a deceased biker in Mechanicsburg, Ohio, was towed to a cemetery in a homemade plexiglass coffin, his body astride his Harley-Davidson motorcycle. There, in accordance with his longstanding request, he was buried, motorcycle and all. 
  
 The services began in New Orleans in 2012 with the death of Lionel Batiste, a brass band leader and dapper man about town. Mr. Batiste had said he did not want to have people looking down at him at his funeral, so at his service, here at Mr. Charbonnet’s funeral home, Mr. Batiste stood with his hands on his walking cane, derby tipped rakishly to one side. 
  
 Then in April of this year, there was the service for Mickey Easterling, a socialite and proficient party hostess. 
  
 “What my mother said to me some years ago was, ‘I want to be at my own funeral having a glass of Champagne in one hand and a cigarette in the other,’ ” said Ms. Easterling’s daughter, Nanci. And so she was, greeting her funeral guests from an elegant bench in the lobby of a historic downtown theater. 
  
 Then this month, Zymora Kimball came to the Charbonnet funeral home to ask about arrangements for Ms. Burbank, who had raised Ms. Kimball like a daughter. Ms. Burbank had been neither wealthy nor widely known outside the neighborhood over which she presided from a table on her front porch. 
  
 Ms. Kimball wanted something “out of the box,” said Lyelle Bellard, the intern funeral director, and when he suggested his plan, she thought it brilliantly captured Ms. Burbank’s style. Mr. Bellard said it did not end up costing much more than a typical funeral. 
  
 Despite the recent interest, organizations representing funeral home directors say this kind of viewing is still rare, and just about everyone, including Ms. Kimball, acknowledges that it is not for everyone. 
  
 Even Ms. Rodríguez in San Juan said she has had to refuse a few suggestions that she found distasteful or that “made no sense.” She will not, for example, do a wake with someone in a swimsuit, she said. ||||| This party's dead! Daughters throw bizarre 'party funeral' for mother including her own body propped up at a table under a disco ball with a cigarette and whiskey in hand 
  
 Miriam Burbank died on June 1 at 53 years old 
  
 Her daughters wanted her funeral to reflect how full of life she was 
  
 The decided on propping their mother's body up at a table stocked with cigarettes and booze 
  
 This is the second New Orleans funeral this year that included the body of the deceased seated with booze and cigarettes 
  
 A New Orleans woman was laid to rest earlier this month - but only after one final party, during which her body was displayed sitting at a table that is fully stocked with beer, whiskey and menthol cigarettes. 
  
 But no party is complete without a flashing disco ball, and 53-year-old Miriam Burbank's funeral service was complete with one of those, as well. 
  
  
  
 Burbank died on June 1. When the funeral home directors at Charbonnet Funeral Home asked Burbank's two daughters what their mother liked, the two women decided they wanted her funeral to reflect that she was full of life. 
  
  
  
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 'Full of life': Miriam Burbank's daughters wanted their mother's funeral be representative of how full of life she was - and this is what they came up with 
  
 Party animal: Burbank's funeral was complete with her dead body propped up at a table with a case of beer and a bottle of whiskey 
  
 Menthols: Burbank's daughters also included a pack of menthol cigarettes 
  
 So the daughters came up with the interesting concept of having their mother's body displayed as though she were at a party - where, presumably, she sat and smoked menthol cigarettes while drinking beer and whiskey as a disco ball lit up the room. 
  
 To honor Burbank's love of the New Orleans Saints football team, her fingernails were painted black and gold - the color of the team's uniforms. 
  
  
  
 According to WGNO, Burbank's daughters said that other family members liked the idea, and thought it was a very fitting goodbye for their mother. 
  
  
  
 This is the second time this year when New Orleans has played host to a rather taboo funeral service. 
  
  
  
 In April, well-known New Orleans philanthropist Mickey Easterling was sent off in a similar fashion. 
  
 Trend: In April, New Orleans socialite Mickey Easterling had a similar funeral service 
  
 Smokers: Like Burbank, Easterling's funeral service included a cigarette and alcohol 
  
 Planned: Unlike Burbank, Easterling planned her entire funeral service, from the champagne to the elaborate hat 
  
 More than a thousand people attended the popular, 83-year-old socialite's funeral - at which her body was propped up on an iron bench with a glass of champagne in one hand and a cigarette holder in the other. 
  
 'She's in a Leonardo outfit,' Sammy Steele, who did Mickey’s hair and make-up, told WGNO at the time. 'And I actually dressed her tonight for the occasion.' 
  
 Easterling was known for being a bit on the fabulous side, so for her funeral she also was wearing and ornate hate and a fancy outfit. 
  
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Student:
A boxer wore his gloves and stood in the corner of the ring, apparently ready for a fight—except for the fact that he was deceased. The scene was the funeral of Christopher Rivera, a former fighter whose memorial service belongs to a relatively new trend: Bodies are posed the way they might have been seen in life. Others featured a man riding a motorcycle and a woman sitting in a chair. "It’s been a real boom in Puerto Rico,” says an exec at the funeral home that organized the events. “People have requested every type of funeral that could possibly come to mind." It began with a man who stood at his funeral; he'd always wanted it that way, family said. And the phenomenon is no longer limited to Puerto Rico. It's been happening in New Orleans, too, where this month a deceased woman sat at a table with a cigarette and a beer during her funeral, the New York Times reports. Her family saw the event as a party, disco ball included, the Daily Mail notes. Unsurprisingly, some have raised objections to the trend. But Puerto Rico has passed a law legalizing the process, and Louis Charbonnet, a New Orleans funeral home head, says a priest has OKed it.