Elaine Stritch: End of An Era

I first became aware of and fell in love with Elaine Stritch when she starred in Noel Coward's "Sail Away" -
a short lived Broadway musical.  I had the pleasure to see her in Company (three times!), once with Dean Jones - the original Bobby - and twice with the darling Larry Kert.

She's 88 years old now and ready to return to Michigan, which she left in 1942. This is a candid look at one of the brightest, toughest, and most gifted stars who has vast cache of back stage stories from the 1940s through 2000+. And each time she shares one there seems to another new one to tell. This is a sort of review/homage to Strritchy (as Coward called her) in the New Yorker.  Here's a little tease:

On Friday evening at the Café Carlyle, before the second-to-last performance of “Elaine Stritch at the Carlyle: Movin’ Over and Out,” Stritch’s farewell show, the crowd was settling in, ordering steak and lobster and Manhattans. The room was packed with theatricality: a woman with a crown of white-blond hair and a high lacy collar and the bearing of Snow White’s stepmother; men in fashionable suits, some with dramatic hair; a woman with a fascinator made of red feathers; Mandy Patinkin, bearded and serious; Michael Riedel, the Post critic, seated in the shadows to one side of the stage.
When the lights went down, Stritch’s accompanist, Rob Bowman, explained what to expect. “This is a very different kind of night,” he said. Stritch, everyone knew, was moving out of the Carlyle Hotel, where she’s lived for the past several years, and out of New York, and going home to Michigan, which she left in 1942. At eighty-eight, she felt it was time; she’s diabetic, and has memory problems, and had a hip replacement, and eye trouble. But her Stritchiness, by God, is still here. Bowman explained that this wasn’t a typical well-rehearsed cabaret show—the Times had tactfully made that clear in its Wednesday review, as if patrons had come for a night of showstoppers, and left confused. “Elaine was asked to do a little something for you all before she leaves for Michigan later in the month. She wants to say hello, goodbye, and everything in between. She wants to come and have a visit. Ladies and Gentlemen, let’s have a visit with Elaine Stritch!”
To wild applause, cheering, and a “Brava!” Stritch, cane in hand, made her way toward the stage as if determinedly fording a stream. She clambered onstage, yelling something feisty; people laughed. In the spotlight, she turned toward the applause. She was wearing her signature outfit: a long white man’s dress shirt, a black vest, black tights, nothing resembling pants. Her shirt buttons were shiny, like diamonds. She bowed, waved, clasped her hands together like a woman in love.
“Isn’t this fantastic, what a star I am?” she yelled. The Carlyle went wild. “I mention I’m going home, and I’m a star immediately! This used to happen with my boyfriends—as soon I’d say ‘I gotta go home now’ they fell in love.” Laugh. “Hard to get. What is it about that? And the newspaper does a picture of you with Tom Hanks, and you’re overnight a star.” The Times piece had featured a picture of Stritch and Hanks greeting each other after the Tuesday show, and another that showed her smiling at tables that included Liza Minnelli, Tony Bennett, and Bernadette Peters. “I went through so many emotions tonight that I’m a wreck,” she said, her voice breaking. The audience cried out in sympathy.
“I am, I’m a wreck! I’ve been up in that room, and I said, you know? Being a Catholic, I always give myself a problem. Sacred Heart Convent girls always give up something. Their prime time is Lent. The harder your life is, oh boy, you’re really making it.” She did a little riff about Catholicism and self-denial and guilt. “We used to go to downtown Detroit and get so drunk on Easter Saturday afternoon. And then you’d go to the cathedral and we’d say, Oh, I did it, I made a total fool out of myself, that’s what I did.”
A man ordered a glass of wine, too loudly. “Who’s talking while I’m telling these jewels? It’s just selfish!” Applause. “There’s something about it that makes sense, Lent. You give something up and everything’s more joyful.” She told more of the Catholicism story, her mood hovering between elegiac and saucy. “We haven’t even done the opening yet. That’s how casual this show is. Should we do the opening?”
“Yes!” the crowd said happily.
Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/2013/04/elaine-stritchs-long-goodbye.html#ixzz2Q3yuKg4X

Go and read the rest.  You won't be disappointed.  I promise.

And so it goes.
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