Will Broadway Dim Its Lights, For Her??????????????????

                           What is it, with all these belated deaths, that occurred during 2014, but are not being recorded, until 2015?????????  First, Bess Myerson, and now Lee Israel???????????  By the way, she was only 75!!!!!!!  I guess, since I have known of her since the early Eighties, I thought she was much older!

                              Who, you may ask, is Lee Israel?  Listen well, children, and  learn!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

                               Lee started out as a semi-respectable celebrity biographer. She was known in this field primarily for her bios of Tallulah Bankhead,, Dorothy Kilgallen, and Estee Lauder.

                                 When the career dried up, she became entrepreneurial. She was a blip on the landscape that is the New York Theater Community, but she was, in some ways, the greatest self-promoter, since Jacqueline Susann!!!!!!!!!!!

                                   The only trouble was, Lee never scaled the heights Susann did, and whatever she reached was done illegally.

                                     Until she was arrested, Lee was this town's greatest literary/celebrity forger.  In a town where you can truly reinvent yourself, Lee took stealing to the level of high art!!!!!!!!!!!!

                                       It did not help, or maybe it did, that Lee was an unrepentant alcoholic.  During my spinster days, while hanging out in Three Lives And Company Bookstore, on Waverly Place, if nature called, I could always dash across the street to Julius'--the allegedly oldest gay bar in town, which I would not doubt, judging from the clientele, all who looked ready to perform "The Iceman Cometh" at a moment's notice!!!!!!!!  But I never sat, darlings, I just stood!  Do not sit down in the bathrooms at Julius', or you may walk away with vermin!!!!!!--and there, at the front of the bar, on a bench, would be Lee, surrounded by a coterie of male gadabouts, all hanging on to her every word, and from whom she probably got free works, master manipulator that she was.  And FAG HAG!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

                                        Whether anyone cares to admit it or not, Lee was a part of the Theater Community.  She was known, in certain circles.

                                          So, should Broadway dim its lights for her?????????

                                           In an odd kind of way, I think it should!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!