Viva La Diva
I sat at my desk, scratching my head, up to my boobs in catalogues and line sheets, trying to source the perfect pair of casual blue socks with the following specifications from an actor, and the costume designer, for “the magic foot” number of The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee running at the Circle in the Square theater on West 50th Street: not too thick, but not too thin; not a dress sock, and not an athletic sock; not wool, 100% cotton; more Midnight Blue than Admiral Blue, but not Oxford blue; no seams in the toes; non binding elastic top, cheap; fast; good quality.
Based on our Pyramid of Possibilities, they could have 2 of the three specs – good, fast, cheap.
They could have it fast and good; fast and cheap, but not good and cheap.
The character uses an unusual technique of spelling words on the floor with his foot during the Spelling Bee -“an alphabetic way to spell,” so the sock had the spotlight. Whatever socks had worked for the previous actors in that role, seemed not to meet the approval of the current dude, so the wardrobe head called me and asked me to investigate “options.” My work, my life, is always about finding more, better, different options for the picayune peculiarities of the personalities trodding the boards on and off Broadway.
Perhaps it’s an occupational hazard that, when I see a show, I’m looking for, or focus on, the base layers beneath the costumes, or in the case of Spelling Bee, a single sock. I couldn’t tell one sock from another from my seat in the audience, but then again, I wasn’t the one wearing them. I see the bra where others see only cleavage. Wardrobe and design people I know are even more narrowly focused on whether zippers or buttons are period appropriate.
When I saw Freud’s Last Session, the actor’s wig kept shrinking back on his skull throughout the first act, revealing more and more of his bald pate, and I wondered if other audience members saw the slippage, or if only theater insiders saw the Topstick failure.
My detective work was happily interrupted when we got a phone call with an extraordinary
invitation.
“Hey Lori! It’s Brendan, long time no speak.” Brendan was a sweet, strapping young man who worked as a wardrobe professional, mainly for touring productions of large and small shows, and other live entertainment.
“Brendan, hi, yes, it has been a long time. You were working on Hairspray last time I heard from you. Whatcha been up to? Still on the road, touring?”
“I’m working with Barbra Streisand now! Her voice is still A- May-zing. Listen, that’s why I’m calling. I need to memo some undergarments for her, some slimmers, you know? But more importantly, I have some exciting news! Hey, is Alan around? Can he get on the phone?”
“Don’t tell me – you’re pregnant. And he’s the father?”
“No! Lori, you’re such a kidder!”
“Hang on a minute, Brendan. I’ll ask Al to pick up an extension.” I got up from my desk and walked into the office.
“Al, Brendan’s on the phone. Remember him? He wants us both to hear some exciting news. Can you pick up please? Line 2.” Alan picked up the handset on his desk, and I returned to my desk in the lingerie lounge.
“Yo! Brendan. How you doin?” Al had adapted former Mayor Ed Koch’s phrase. Koch liked to walk among his people and ask ‘How’m I doin?’
“I’m doing great. So I’m in Philly with Barbra Streisand. She’s giving her first live concert in many years, she’s taking her show on the road. Her stage fright is legendary, right?
Well, for the first time e-v-e-r she’s agreed to an invited dress rehearsal. The crew, well, I have been asked to invite a friendly, theater loving crowd of insiders so she can rehearse in front of live bodies, give her a feel for it before she has to perform in front of thousands of people!
“Would you like to come to see Barbra? I have 4 tickets I can give you. It’s next
Wednesday afternoon at the Wachovia Center in Philly.”
“Brilliant. Brendan, that’s brilliant. You’re in the big time now, kid. You know, we’ve only been out of the shop together once, and that was to attend Steve Kleiser’s funeral a few years ago. Did you know Steve from Urinetown?”
“No. Never met him.”
“Helluva nice guy. Died from liver failure from the chemical cocktail he took to keep his
HIV under control. Shame.”
“That’s too bad. I’m sorry to hear it. So do you guys want to see Barbra?”
““Lorelie,” Alan called through the glass partition that separated us. “Want to go to Philly next week?”
“Holy crap! That’s awesome!” I said into the phone, reminding Alan that he didn’t have to shout through the walls.
The three of us chatted a while, and Brendan caught us up on his life with the bus and
trucks.
“So you’ll come? You guys take such good care of us on the road, and I wanted to do something for you.” That touched me; we rarely got recognition for our efforts, and hardly ever got thanked. And what could be more perfect than getting freebies to see BarBRA?
“Well hell yes we will come! Oh my god, Barbra Streisand! If we have to close for the day, we will be there. I’m looking forward to seeing you. Hey, does the diva need anything else in the way of underwear?”
“Yes, we need help, but I’ve only just looked at all the clothes today. I’ll have to call you later when I have a better idea what we need. Just some shapers, for now.”
“We can hand deliver for you Brendan! Thank you so much. I’m very excited!”
I jotted down the sizes La Diva said she wore, with the caveat, she hated wearing bras. I thought 36D. She liked 38C. Though they be sister sizes, the 38 band size, alas, would be too big, and thus, unsupportive, and yes, the word I hate, “comfortable.” A bra is only uncomfortable when it is the wrong fit!
I had been a Streisand fan since I was a little girl and heard her songs on AM radio. Then Barbra on Ed Sullivan. Then Funny Girl. My parents had a few of her albums, and when they played her records instead of watching TV, Dad was more than likely feeling frisky. Barbra was a Brooklyn girl, Erasmus Hall graduate, Flatbush. My Grandma Helen kvelled over Barbra, whose voice melted the ice of Helen’s heart. As a teenager, when my parents went out for the night and my boyfriend Brian came over, I’d dim the lights and play some Barbra myself.
People, people who need people….are the luckiest people in the world.
Al and I talked excitedly about this extraordinary opportunity. Then we considered whom to offer the other pair of tickets.
“Who should we ask to join us?” I asked tentatively. This could be a family political nightmare – his family, my family, which sister, whose brother….
“That’s a good question. Any ideas?”
I had a lot of ideas, but none of them would go over well with Alan. He and my family members had contentious relationships, and somehow, whenever we received extra tickets for anything, inviting my family members was not an option at all. We’d had many petty disagreements about this, and truth be told, it was not worth my life force to argue about it.
My sister Joy happened to be a rabid Barbra fan, and I would have loved to offer the tickets to her. I remember her as a young child, sitting and rocking herself back and forth while listening to Barbra’s sweet voice floating from the record player through the rooms of our apartment.
“Wouldn’t it be nice if Mommy sounded like that?” Joy had asked me on many
occasions.
Our mother’s voice sounded like a hyena – shrill, loud, looney, and evoked a similar response as fingernails on the blackboard. Her shrewish shrieks could be heard at the other end of the hallway on our floor of the 23 storey building, in the elevators, and sometimes from our terrace our eighth floor windows as she summoned us home from play. My sibs and I dubbed her
“the witch,” a moniker we still used on the rare occasion her name darkened our conversation.
Many in the family, and some friends, prodded my mother about her farbissinna face, a Yiddish word meaning sourpuss, or mean person. The paternal relatives used that word, and most of the yentas who lived in the building did too. Mom stomped her foot a lot, more like a bratty 10 year old than anyone’s mother. If one of us kids did or said anything she didn’t like, her eyes bulged out of their sockets and she’d screech, slam, and throw things until she’d had her way, and we received the punishment she thought we deserved. She threatened us with, and frequently used “the strap” to mete out discipline. Her demands and commands ended with, Or Else!
Mom once hurled an iron across the living room, at my sister Sue and me, for some horrific six year old’s offense which I cannot remember. We hid under a two tier, black and green marble end table, which lost a large chunk of one corner when the iron hit it.
My relationship with Mom continued to devolve well into my middle aged years, so she was not amongst my candidates to invite. She had aged badly and reigned as Queen of the Curmudgeons. She sucked the life out of everything and everyone in her path. Elderly, stooped over old men pushing shopping carts in supermarkets, cleared the aisles when Mom came through. She viciously bumped the slippered, shuffling shoppers when they moved too slowly for her liking, “Move it buster, I don’t have all day.” In fact, Time was all she had.
If we offered any two of our numerous siblings, nieces and nephews tickets, the rest of the clan members could be annoyed or envious. Even as adults, and though they might deny it, the childhood rivalries still persisted in both our families. We had to invite someone neutral, who would not cause any disharmony between or among our immediate families.
I remembered that Rose, Alan’s Uncle Phil’s wife, was a huge Streisand fan, and had paid top dollar to see Barbra in concert before her first retirement from live venue performing. Uncle Phil was a septuagenarian and Rose, many years his junior. They lived in suburban Maryland, and we usually only saw them at large family functions – bar mitzvahs, milestone birthdays, weddings, funerals. This would give us the opportunity to spend some quality time together.
I liked Rose. She and I shared a lot in common as the wives of Kaplan men. The similarities
between Alan and his uncle were not surprising, considering Phil was Alan’s late father’s brother. Side by side they looked like father and son, two tall, nice looking men with similar receding hairlines, familiar eyes and lips, same body type. Both men had hard exteriors and saw the world in black in white. They were stubborn and strong willed, and had an old fashioned Yiddishkeit, Jewish inflected wisdom, mannerisms, way of speaking.
Phil had an impressive career working for Grumman, and had been one of the engineers who worked on the Lunar Excursion Module used by Apollo 11 in 1969 when they landed on the moon. We met the senior Kaplans in D.C for a weekend when Alan and I were newly married, and visited the Museum of Air, Sea and Space. When we ventured upon the LEM in the museum, Phil excitedly recounted his work on the project. He pointed out a small valve inside the module.
“See that piece, right there?” He pointed to something so small I could hardly see it. “My team worked on that. Without that piece, this whole vehicle couldn’t have worked properly.” If Phil had been wearing a shirt with buttons, they all would have popped from pride.
I greatly admired that Phil had done something important with his life, something that made and changed history, something that elevated mankind. He was an everyday hero to me. Alan didn’t have that kind of ambition. He lacked passion, enthusiasm, and stick-to-itiveness. He got bored easily, tired of responsibility quickly, and was detail oriented to the point that he lost sight of the big picture. He did not play well with others.
Alan called Rose, the couple’s social coordinator, and extended the invitation, which she delightedly accepted. A week later we boarded an Amtrak Metroliner at Penn Station in New York; Rose and Phil rode up from DC. We met at 30th street Station in Philly for lunch, and then headed over to the stadium.
The early October weather brought warm sunshine as we waited on a long, snaking line outside Wachovia Center. The arrival time called for noon, but unexpected technical difficulties kept us waiting longer than we liked. Here and there Alan and I spotted a familiar face and waved hi, or casually chatted about how privileged we felt to be invited to something so spectacular. Barbra had some serious groupies in the crowd!
After about an hour of impatient shuffling from one foot to the other, the line began to move and we were admitted to the stadium. The whole process went slowly because of the beefed up security in the new world order. We had been advised to leave all bags and backpacks at home, and anyone who did not abide by that dictum was promptly relieved of their property, taken out of line, and searched. Women had to display the contents of their handbags before being admitted through the metal detectors, and men had to empty their pockets, just like
airport security.
I was happy that we had decided not to carry any undergarments for Barbra with us, and shipped them instead, though I imagined if we had brought them, we’d have been able to enter through the stage door, and then shown to our seats as happened when we hand delivered to the Broadway houses. Then again, under new security rules, who knew if that protocol was still in place? The first time I ever made a delivery to a stage door near curtain time, and hoards of fans waited in cordoned off lines while I gained Open-Sesame admittance, I felt titillated. The stage was just feet from mine, everyone readied themselves for PLACES! Every night was a brand new performance, and that had a lot of powerful energy.
Once screened and inside, feeling oh-so-safe, we were guided up a single escalator and through a single door into the stadium. We walked past the dark and silent concessions, and I wondered, at a normal performance, what would the haul be by the end of the night? Could I count that high?
We entered through a double door, and as I surveyed the enormity of the arena, I wondered which was worse: being on stage and staring into roughly 45 thousand empty seats; or staring at a full house with 45 thousand pair of eyes staring back.
We walked down concrete steps, past rows of empty aluminum bleachers, to our seats, on the main floor, 10 rows from the stage. We sat in neatly arranged rows of folding chairs, though we were invited to sit anywhere we liked. Merely 200 people were in attendance, and we seemed dwarfed by the vast emptiness of the place.
Now this is what you called a perq! Being invited to what I considered a once-in-a-lifetime experience served as an acknowledgement of our status in the theatrical community, and made some of the daily bullshit bearable. I felt validated, and grateful to be privy to such an extraordinary event, up close and personal with Barbra, a living, breathing, perfectly tuned musical instrument, and legend in her own time. I wished my father could see me now.
This was Streisand’s first stateside tour since 1994, and her first live concert since her supposed farewell in Vegas in 1999. As the house lights dimmed, Babs rose from a platform in the center of the stage, a spotlight following her ascent. Because this was a dress rehearsal, adjustments to microphone placement, volume and sound controls, lighting, and other staging factors occurred in real time throughout the performance. Barbra chatted casually as she relaxed and became more comfortable on stage in front of an adoring audience.
“You know, “ she quipped to the crowd, “tomorrow night this place will be filled with forty five thousand paying customers!” True, we had not paid for tickets, but we had spent a coupla hundred bucks on train fare, and a few hours of travel time to support Barbra in overcoming her stage fright.
Barbra began her set wearing a black sequined outfit with a thigh high slit skirt, and then changed costumes several times between numbers. The pop quartet of pseudo-classical tenors, Il Divo, clad in black tuxedos, did robust renditions of Unchained Melody in various languages, My Way, and they joined Barbra for Evergreen. Barbra seemed to enjoy the scripted flirtation and flattery, but I just wished they’d shut up and let La Streisand sing.
Personally, I didn’t care for the overzealous, too-loud and emphatic style of the Italian stallions. The Tin Man from Wizard of Oz moved with more ease and fluidity than they did. I recalled seeing an infomercial for their latest platinum album in which snippets of their songs played while a spokesperson urged us to Call Now! Order in the next thirty minutes and you’ll receive not one, but TWO Il Divo albums. Blech.
After rising like Venus on the half shell again from below the stage, Babs emerged wearing an ill fitting, voluminous blue gown that added about 10 pounds to her slender frame.
“What the hell is she wearing?” Alan asked.
“I can’t imagine who chose that outfit for her. She looks awful!” I piped up.
“I’ve seen her wear much more flattering clothes than this,” said Rose.
After completing her set there must have been some backstage drama about the clothes too, because she didn’t appear on stage again for 40 minutes. A voice announced to the crowd, “Please be patient. We are experiencing some technical difficulties.” I secretly hoped our friend Brendan, the wardrobe supervisor, wasn’t having his hide tanned by the irate diva, and also hoped that whomever had chosen that dress had gotten out of Dodge safely.
“She looks pretty good, though she could stand to wear a better bra,” Alan said. He couldn’t help noticing boobs and bras wherever we went. Sometimes he handed Bra Tenders business cards to unknown women wearing ill fitting bras, along with the comment, “We can help you.” I told him he was lucky he hadn’t been stabbed yet.
As it turns out, there was NoBra for Barbra. In various interviews on various red carpets, Barbra revealed that she didn’t wear bras because she did minimal breast feeding and her boobs were in pretty good shape without additional support. I guess her argument had merit because she had fooled Alan the expert. I thought her boobs pointed a little too east-west, and I always preferred a higher profile to one that’s heading south. But who am I to argue with a Diva?
When Babs came back for her last set, she wore a black Donna Karan pantsuit with a gossamer, draped front cardigan, with sleeves that flitted like wings as she moved about the stage. Her exquisite voice, with both depth and crystal clear high notes, created golden music that sounded as perfect live as it did on a recording.
The show was heavy on standards, one of the highlights being a FunnyGirlmedley. Il Divo performed between acts while Barbra took a break, as well as songs with the diva. I particularly loved Barbra’s rendition of a song from South Pacific, “Carefully Taught,” which opens with the line “you’ve got to be taught to hate and fear.” She gushed about her love for her sons and her husband, handsome hunks James and Josh Brolin. She performed “When the Sun Comes Out,” one of my all time favorite standards, and when we returned home, I downloaded every version of the song by every artist who ever recorded it. Fond memories of my youth were stirred by her rendition of “Alfie,” which was a favored make-out song among my clique of friends when I was 15.
We heard an anecdote about why she used teleprompters during the performance. She had forgotten the lyrics to a song while singing for one hundred and fifty thousand people in Central Park in 1967, songs she could sing forward and backward, in her sleep. She was traumatized by the experience, couldn’t find any humor in it, was so distraught over the incident that she didn’t perform live again for almost 30 years. Teleprompters relieved her anxiety and dialed down the stagefright a notch.
Barbara stirred up some controversy with a satirical political skit in which comic Steve Bridges offered a spot-on impression of then President, George W. Bush. The discourse between Barbra and the “President” clearly conveyed her disdain for, and disapproval of Bush era politics. The pair went back and forth on current issues, about our invasion of Iraq, and the cost of war compared to that of education. Barbra was quite vocal about her political beliefs, and the skit ended with the pair doing a rendition of “Happy Days Are Here Again,” though I don’t remember how the contentious dialogue segued into that happy ditty, a duet that Barbra once performed with Judy Garland.
Barbra was criticized for bringing politics into the arena. In a widely reported story, Barbra lost her temper with an impatient crowd in New York’s Madison Square Garden, just a few days after the rehearsal we attended, which resulted in her telling an audience member, “Shut the fuck up. If you can’t take a joke, then leave and get your money back.” She apologized, saying “I shouldn’t have lost it,” and her humility helped her win back the audience.
Even though I did not witness such an interaction at our concert, I could see how many Republicans would be inflamed by her strong opinions, and I was amused when I read it in the headlines of the NY Times. One of the fun aspects of my work is being privy to public happenings before they become public. I personally agreed with Streisand’s liberal views, and knew this could be a possible source of contention between Rose and Phil and me. Rose had a big job working for the Social Security administration, and both she and Phil were lifelong Republicans and fans of W. Luckily, we never discussed politics, and I was relieved that the senior Kaplans took Barbra’s political passion with a grain of salt and good humor.
I was happy to learn that Barbra put her money where her million dollar mouth was. She released a statement that said: “The increasingly urgent need for private citizen support to combat dangerous climate change, along with education and health issues was the prime reason I decided to tour again. This will allow me to direct funds and awareness to causes that I care deeply about.” Designated proceeds from the concerts would be distributed through The Streisand Foundation to support philanthropic initiatives. Yeah Babs.
The opening concert was the highest single-event gross in the history of the arena. The tour played to the tune of ninety two million dollars by the time it was over, with ticket prices averaging three hundred and fifty to seven hundred and fifty dollars, more for special elite, premium seats. I thought we had a pretty premium deal, sitting front and center of a virtually private, four hour long concert with Barbra Streisand.