Girls, We Just Love Lucy and Lucia!!!!!!!

Now, I am not talking about Lucille Ball, darlings, though of course we love her. I am talking of course about Lucy Hardin, that good time gal with bad breaks immortalized by Joan Crawford in the 1964 classic "Strait-Jacket." Sweeties, there in NOTHING straight about this movie except a hunky uncredited Lee Majors and Carol's fiance. But more on him later.

Lucy just can't get a break. After hacking her two timing hubby and his mistress to death with an ax, putting in 20 years time at an asylum--read, running the Pepsi Cola company--Lucy is set free only to find someone out there is tryng to "gaslight" her--pinning murders on her to make her look bad. Poor Lucy! You just gotta feel sorry for Joan; it is one of her more sympathetic roles. Especially when like all us girls she dons that trampy 40s regailia strutting through town trying to look 30 when she is well past 60. And how those braclets jangle!!!! Then there is her daughter Carol, brilliantly played by Diane Baker, a Miss Butter Would Not Melt In Her Mouth type, and the most duplicitous social climbing bitch this side of Miss Veda Pierece. In fact I think she is worse than Veda; at least with her you know what you are dealing with, unlike Miss Carol who pulls the wool over everyone's eyes. And her wholesome act is so cloying no wonder her horny fiance, on first glancing Joan, wants to bang the old broad? Who could blame him, with Diane Baker looking so tight and repressed her legs are probably clamped shut for good!!! You know mine aren't, darlings!

I am telling you everyone in this film is a fucking bitch! Rochelle Hudson as Emily has ice in her veins and social contempt a plenty. The first time I saw this film I was convinced she was doing the murders. And how about Edith Atwater as Mrs. Field, Michael's Oedipal mother. That is one cold bitch; what with dueling psychos going at in her master bedroom, and she just calmly phones the police with all the calmness of a pizza order!!!! This broad is more ready for the canners than Joan; too bad she did not get axed!!!!!

But in the end Lucy triumphs and we love her!

Then there is that other Lucy--Lucia!!!! I am talking of course about "Lucia di Lammermoor," the fabulously produced Donizetti opera at the Met. This could have been written for me, girls--
a crazed hysteric abused by men who kills her husband on her wedding day, descends a grand staricase in a fashionably bloodied wedding gown, then sings herself into insanity, drops dead and dies. Only to come back from the grave and drive Edgardo, her true love, to suicide!

Darlings, I love Lucia. This is like a typical day in my life! And I am telling you, those vicious opera queens. I mean, at the Act Two intermission, I am in the bathroom doing what we girls have to do, and these two queens are at adjoining urinals discussing vocal subtleties while checking each others' members out! Honey, the only members the Met is interested in are its wealthy subscribers. If this is what you are after, head south of 14th Street. Or the East Village. Slap these opera queens silly!!!!!

But girls a night on the town with Lucia and Joan is enough to do even the most vigorous of queens in. So tonight it is time to put my feet up on the ottoman and curl my toes while applying shocking pink nail polish. Gotta get ready for my next big night out--whenever that may be!

Ta ta, girls!

Girls, We Butterflies Flit From Stem To Stem!!!!!

Social butterflies, that is! I am telling you, girls, how is one to keep up with oneself in one weekend? Where is the chance to rest? Even God gave Himself that! Between coffee, dinner and "The Apartment" with Vincent, work on Saturday followed by dinner with Tom across the river in Newark, NJ yet! and Sunday with Danny watching "Serial Mom", dining at the Telephone Bar and Grill in the distant (for me) East Village, then dashing over West to Dignity to do my choral/ spritual stint, darlings I need a day off just from my weekend?

I bet Donna McKechnie rests! I bet Sammy Williams rest! And you know they dance full out every day!

Meanwhile my legs get tighter from all this dance, barre and Yoga work. Now if only there were a man to wrap them around! Sigh!

I am running SO low on moisturizer, I have to remind myself to go to the store and get home. One more year of life means one more layer to slather on. You think it is easy maintaining oneself in a youth dominated society, even if I AM an ingenue, even IF my professional age is 24!!!

Is it any wonder Monday has been recounted negatively in songs like "Rainy Days and Mondays," and even the more perky "Monday, Monday?" "Can't trust that day" darlings!
John Phillips was damn right, even if I did have more of the hots for Denny. And have you seen Denny lately? He looks like some big old bear who you see Sundays in New York at the Dugout!!!!

Darlings, why should I be seen there when there is much more elegant stuff at the Metropolitan Museum of Art!!! Just call me Holly Golightly!

Have we had our breakfast at Tiffany's, yet, darlings??? Have a fabulous day, my pets!!!!
And get those nails done!!!!!

Girls, We Are Such Excellent Role Models!!!!

Ever since our anointment years before by St. Elizabeth of Taylor, we have become the arbiters for taste in our society. And why not? We know best what should be eaten, worn, seen, read and consorted with for the asking. Do you think any of us need astrologers or columnists like Cindy Adams or Liz "bulldyke" Smith to tell US what to do? Not so my sweets! We are Masters of Our Own Domain and that means everything that phrase applies. So is it any wonder the unenlightened come to us for enlightment? Sweeties, when those less knowledgeable appeal to my more brilliant sensibilities I just look at them compassionately and address them with the facts as though they were Homer Simpson sitting in front of his television set. Which in some cases they are.

Let's face it, girls, most of us consciously fled a Homer Simpson television based situation based on our early upbringings. We fled from the land of child molested milk cartons to the land of flowered chintz!!!!

Girls, I want you to go home tonight and think to yourselves about expanding possibilities. And no I am NOT talking about your waist and girdle size. They are big enough already. Look at your world situation as one to be dealt with exclusively by rouge or mascara. Even some Maybelline lip gloss. Darlings, if my lips are not succulent when I leave the house in the morning, I might just as well be naked!

So get a good night sleep, put that cold cream and face mask over your eyes and shut out the world like Bette Davis as 1930s Baby Jane!!!!!!!!

"Pardon me. Ah'm Miz Brent!"

Sammy, Oh Sammy

Time to get real for just an installment, Girls!

Sometimes the defining moments of one's life are not apparent--at least completely--when they are before you. Case in point takes me back to the afternoon of October 25, 1975, when, with my father, I saw for the first time, a then"new" musical entitled "A Chorus Line" with the now legendary Original Cast.

The critical acumen in me knew I was seeing a classic the instant the lights came up. What I did not realize was I was witnessing something that would come to guide me in the years ahead, particularly in the presences of two "liners" who came to be my angels--Donna McKechnie, whom almost anyone who knows me has heard me waz rhapsodic about for over thirty years.

But few know of my other angel in that show,my hero, Sammy Williams.

Why is Sammy my hero?

Well, for starters we are both Jersey boys--he from Trenton, I from Highland Park. We are both Scorpios and November babies--he the 13th and I the 18th, albeit six years apart--Sammy in 1948, myself in 1954. We both grew up gay in an environment and time that did not promote that and found our respective ways out--Sammy with dance, myself with books and academics.

But it all came together that October afternoon. Watching the show with my father next to me is still one of the more memorable experiences of my life, not only because my father was enormously impressed by what he saw; at 92 he still remembers "A Chorus Line" and Donna McKechnie, but for what he does not know, which is this--that as we were watching it, especially as I was watching Sammy do the Paul monologue--and no one did it better--I kept glancing over at my father, then at Sammy, then at my father, fearful he would detect my secret, which was earlier that same week--October 20, to be exact, while at college, I had had my very first homosexual (altogether sexual, as the notion of women repulsed me) experience.

As the years widened, so too did this memory. And with the years, as I watched Sammy struggle, he, helped me to struggle; at many points when I wanted to give up I would often say, "Sammy would never give up." And he never has, as from what I understand he is bravely attempting to reignite his career.

I always wished I could tell this to Sammy personally. Maybe I am doing so here. How that afternoon, and his presence, helped a tender 20 year old from Jersey face himself. How it ultimately guided me into a musical theater class, culminating in a Master's degree, a job in the arts, and life in New York City. My dream of fame never came true, but with Sammy to inspire me, I have somehow been able to get through whatever low points I have reached.

We the theatergoers owe an enormous debt to "A Chorus Line." In addition I owe an enormous debt to Sammy.

So to Sammy I say--please keep working and struggling so that I can continue to. You are not a quitter and have helped me not to be one and your efforts will pay off. In some distant future perhaps we can cross paths in New York where I can make this all abundantly clear.

But this will have to suffice. For now.