Call on Dolly!

What this week has needed was some good news, and trust the Divine Miss M. to come through, and how. Word that she's headed to the Great White Way in the Great White Whale of Big Lady Roles has flashed across the cybersphere to a rare and near-unanimous chorus of praise and anticipation.

Heaven Much Better

If you're looking for a little diversion for a Sunday (or any other, for that matter) evening, may I recommend the above?  Here, in its glorious entirety, is the video record of the Divine Miss M.'s Depression Tour, which is best known as the basis for her epic double album (remember those?), Live at Last, but which was apparently (and unknown to me) also turned into a cable special called The Better Midler Show.  I just love finding essential pop ephemera that I should have known about during the Carter administration...

Shameless Sunday Camp Explosion: The Divine

Taste has no system and no proofs.

- Susan Sontag, "Notes on Camp"

Since it's Bette Midler's birthday, herewith, Dear Readers, a gift for you.

Shameless Saturday Camp Explosion: Don't Look Down

"Camp taste is, above all, a mode of enjoyment, of appreciation - not judgment. Camp is generous."

- Susan Sontag, "Notes on Camp"

Herewith a Very Special Edition of SSCE, an old familiar treasure I was lucky enough to stumble upon this morning.  It's one I suspect will be familiar to many a Gentle Reader, but it remains as wonderful the thirty-oddth time as it was all those years ago back in the summer of 1984.  It's Bette Midler's epochal Art or Bust tour, seen in its full version (rather than the sadly trimmed hour-long HBO special that omitted, if memory serves, the incredible medley of "Broken Bicycles," "Everyone's Gone to the Moon," and "Here Comes the Flood").  It's all here - her swaggering "Pink Cadillac," the great bits of video from the Continental Baths and her breakthrough appearance on the AJC telethon, her Dolores DeLago disco marathon (in which the Harlettes prove they are troupers in every way), and finally a breathtaking "Stay with Me."  It holds up.

Art or Bust came out just as I turned 21, and watching after very nearly three decades (and many, many viewings in the interim), it struck me how much it was part of shaping my taste, shaking me out of the solemnity of studying Art History and showing me that it was possible to take things - funny, sad, loud, mad - right to the edge and then that little bit beyond.  We may none of us have the unstoppable momentum, the half-crazed inspiration, of the Divine Miss M. (I didn't then, and heaven knows don't have it today), but how lucky we are to bask in her glow, to draw on her energy - her extraordinary generosity as a performer - even now.  If you've got a spare hour-and-a-half this Decoration Day weekend (for all you Statesiders), enjoy.

I've Got a Date (in Constantinople)

This deathless clip - from the fabulous "Around the World in Eighty Ways Revue" of the one and only Miss Vickie Eydie (of whom there is no doubt that she is a lounge act) - heralds some amusing news, darlings. 

Yes, it's true - I'm jetting off to meet Mr. Muscato on the shores of the Bosporus (where we will no doubt get preposterous).  He's crossing the Med from Cairo with some friends, I fly in from the Sandlands at very nearly the same time, and we'll all have a jolly long weekend in Taksim. 

I was last in Istanbul (not Constantinople) nearly ten years ago, in what turned out to be the waning months of my carefree bachelor days.  In memory it was a supremely amusing place, and if at that time that involved some unlikely-to-be-repeated naughtiness, well - that's nobody's business but the Turks...

Public Service Announcement: Mother Nature

Now, I'm admittedly not the most ultragreen person around.  Living in one of the most hellish climates on earth, we use way too much air-conditioning, and recycling is a concept that is, as yet, still a glimmer in local government's eye in these parts (we now have separate bins, one black, one pointedly green - but they both get dumped in the same trucks).  I'd be a flat-out liar if I said that I turn out every light, that I'm reconsidering my carbon footprtint, or that I have any intention of swearing off raspberries flown half-way 'round the world from New Zealand or worse just for my delectation.  Count it as yet another area in which I'm hopelessly spoiled.

Still, who better to start me and all of us on the path to more thoughtful living than the Divine Miss M.?  Her high-profile work over the past few years to re-green New York's blighted parks has been yet another reminder that I'm far too far from home - she even tweets about hanging out at the park café near my old place!   I could meet her while volunteering! (Even though, now that I'm hitched, it's something I'd no longer need to do - everyone knows that people in Manhattan only volunteer to either find a partner, spend time away from a partner, or find a new partner.  It's a rule.)

Drat.  Even trying to be all noble and altruistic can make me grumpy...

He Told Me to Open Wide...

Just so you know that I do intend to entertain as well as whine, herewith the young Miss M. at her bawdiest (well, close), to introduce a tale of woe.

The minibreak was a great success, but darlings, the hours preceding it were fraught.  Our saga starts one night late last week, when I was swanning about feeling terribly posh at a very glam local soirée, the kind of gala party at which these parts excel.  A band was playing, the canapés were being handed about, and, on behalf of Golden Handcuffs Consulting Amalgamated International (before whose mast, as it were, I labor), I was all set to give a gracious little speech.

Alas, it was not to be.  While moving around, greeting friend and foe alike (have you mastered the art of the forced smile? I have, and deploy it at will), I had the uneasy feeling that all was not right.  I bit with gay abandon into a shrimp puff, and knew for a fact that it was so:  a decade of dental neglect had come home to roost, and how.  Gathering up the remnants of my suddenly vanished elegance (and not a few fragments of tooth), I skedaddled, leaving my clever little remarks to a colleague and racing home to commiserate with poor Mr. Muscato.

Now, I do confess it isn't wise to leave these things undone, but you have to realize I have what amounts to a genuine phobia about dentists, the legacy of my late mother's unquestioning devotion to her childhood practitioner, who by the time I came around was best described as Dr. Shakes McParkinsons.  Between the ages of one-and-a-half and six, I was forced to spend ample time in his terrifyingly primitive offices (all of his equipment was black enamel, the kind more usually seen on vintage typewriters or the switchboards answered by extras in films of the '30s.  Much of it was pedal-operated.  Get the picture?) as the result of an early childhood accident.  Never the most coordinated of tots, I fell off a bed.  Into a wastebasket.  About three weeks later, my elder brother looked up at breakfast one morning and asked, "Did the baby's nose always look like that?"  It hadn't, and neither had most of what turned out to be a thoroughly rearranged jaw.  It's amazing, really, that I have teeth at all.  My early childhood was a festival of bizarre full-cranial apparatuses to be worn at night, as well as the complete lack of any photos of me smiling, what with not having any front baby teeth.  I'm still probably the only person you know who can eat corn on the cob without using any canine teeth.  Molaring away isn't efficient, but until I was about eleven, I had no choice.

In any case, the tender ministrations of Doctor Shakes left their mark.  For a number of years, I was terrified not merely of dentists, but of anyone in white.  Weddings were a fiasco of helpless wailing, and poor Grandmother Muscato used to ring ahead to the local department store to have the ladies in Cosmetics near the door stow their labcoats in order to avoid my having a meltdown on the way to her favorite destination, Modern Matrons, the most elegant corner of Better Dresses.  The combination of crippling fear and some of the places we've lived (the average dental facility in West Africa making Doctor Shakes's SweeneyToddian premises look like the Mayo Clinic) have meant putting off the day of reckoning until, as this past Thursday, I had no choice.

So off we went, me in no fit shape to be seen in public, to a dentist highly recommended by one of Mr. Muscato's friends.  One of his more sadistic friends, it turns out, for the dentist - let's call him Dr. Ahmed - was nothing if not direct.  "Your mouth," he informed me in no uncertain terms and a nearly unintelligible Syrian accent, "ees a dizeszter."  And then, ignoring all attempts to make him pity me my crippling fears, and abetted by two equally obdurate Philippina assistants, he set to to work, pausing only long enough for me to contemplate what seemed to be my clearly imminent mortality, but not long enough for me to demand novocaine (novocaine?  I wanted morphine).  He drilled, he filled, he used some sort of miniaturized jackhammer on places that haven't seen the light of day in ages, and, while he may not the kind of dentist immortalized in the classic number above (although he is, I have to admit, comely enough for a middle-aged Syrian dentist), he certainly was thorough.

I think his take-no-prisoners approach may have done what years of Specialists in the Sensitive Patient back in Manhattan were never able to achieve.  I have to go back for a second appointment next week, and while I'm hardly looking forward to it, I'll probably go.  And I must say things are feeling better.

The only real effect of all this on our lovely weekend was a certain tenderness, leading to a great deal of soup and the less chewy cuts of meat.  Now we're home safely, the dogs are over the moon - and I have to take Mr. Muscato to the dentist.  He's not quite the dizeszter I was, but it looks like we'll be seeing more and more of Dr. Ahmed...

Kids in America

The past is another country:  one in which Bette Midler and David Bowie share a fondness for ruthlessly bleached poodle cuts; in which Michael Jackson's fashion choices almost make sense; in which Cher can be the least fussily turned out person in any group; and in which that other woman is international song sensation Kim Wilde.

Well, I suppose she still is, but honestly - did you recognize her?  Do you, as Miss Cara once implored, remember her name?

How do you suppose this distinctly eclectic evening turned out?  Based on Cher's expression, I'm not optimistic...

Auto-Doppelgängers

Sometimes people look so much like themselves that they look more like imitations of themselves. I like that. And clearly, a little something to take the edge off never hurts...

She Loves the Nightlife

Bette, out on the town a few decades ago. Were any of us really ever so young? And isn't that an awfully formal tablesetting for her to be wearing more or less a wifebeater? So many questions...

Midler a la Lee

The Divine Miss M. gives us a little acting lesson, courtesy of Leiber, Stoller, and Norma Deloris Egstrom. I don't generally give much shrift to covers of such iconic material, but for Bette I'll almost always make an exception.

She uses my favorite part of her voice - I think of it as her 40s radio sound - a lot here, along with her Gallant Indomitable Survivor mode. What can I say? For me, it works...

Birthday Bombshell: The Divine

One of the oddities of getting, shall we say, older, is that one's youthful idols do too; nonetheless it seems quite, quite impossible that the Divine Miss M. should actually be 63 today.

Of course, 63, thank Heaven, isn't quite what it used to be.

One of the secrets of Miss M.'s success, I believe, is that she's never quite taken it all seriously, whether the it in question is cult stardom in the 70s, film stardom in the 80s, falterings and missteps in the 90s, or her recent resurgence as a Vegas star (just like her early alter ego, the inimitable Miss Vickie Eydie). She's a remarkably clear-eyed diva, one who has enjoyed the ups and weathered the downs of one of the most varied careers that comes to mind.

Actually, she does appear to take one thing seriously: Real Life. Behind the stilettos and curls and the long, long trip from the Continental Baths to Caesar's Palace is a thoughtful, funny, wry woman who is a wife, mother, and generous spirit.

Maybe that's why she looks every bit as good in a raincoat and no makeup in a garden, at something like a Certain Age, as she did in full 70s drag or in a bed of gold satin.

Like I say, probably too often, there's a lesson there, darlings. I only hope she sits down someday and writes at least some of it down; her first quasi-memoir, A View from a Broad, was a riot.

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Yesterday, When We Were Young

Bette Midler, 1972

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Aretha Franklin, 1960

The Primettes, 1959

Cher, 1967

Picture This: Richard Amsel

I recently discovered that I have to add another entry to the long list of Things I Will Never Do: have my portrait done by Richard Amsel. I remember, as a child, staring at his illustrations - on record covers, magazines (he was a TV Guide stalwart), and movie posters - and thinking he was just... just...

Now I know what I was thinking: camp as a row of tents. But definitely gifted, and, at his best, up there with the best.

He did a lot to set Bette Midler's image in the popular imagination:


He burnished La Streisand's legend as a quirky beauty:

And he made many, many turgid seventies films seem a whole lot more stylish and interesting than actually they were:

I think, if I had been able to be one of his subjects,
it might have turned out something like Miss Lansbury,
seen here waving from the bottom right, opposite Miss Davis.

We lost him, as so many others, in the mid-eighties, and we're the poorer for it.