Topic Someone write something! from the General Chit-Chat forum.
Post a reply or begin a new topic.
View other threads or jump to a different forum.
| Author | Topic: Someone write something! |
|---|
Anonymous
Anonymous Poster
From Internet Network:
129.98.226.x | posted: 12/11/2005 at 2:56:32 PM ET
Please!
| Karen
Registered User
Registered:
5/3/2002 | posted: 12/11/2005 at 7:01:02 PM ET
Okay, I'll volunteer. Since it's kind of slow right now, how about if I just post an old magazine article--very old, but I don't think it's ever been posted here before. It's from the January 1982 issue of Esquire and is entitled "A Brief Encounter With Bernadette Peters." For some reason, there's no author credited.
She was born in Queens in a section called Ozone Park, which is appropriate. Bernadette Peters is vaporous. She's a delicately carved miniature who doesn't speak so much as expel puffs of air from her pouting, cherry-red lips.
Tonight she seems to have charged her hair with electrons, causing it to explode up from her tiny head. She wears a cream-colored knit dress that celebrates her curves, has draped a rustle of gold-dipped leaves around her neck, and sports copper snakeskin shoes. Sitting here over drinks and coffee, she responds politely, though she guards her words as resolutely as Diana held to her chastity.
By her own admission, there is no singular public perception of her. She sings, she acts, she dances. The material she renders, the roles she plays, are various to the extreme. On a recent recording she sang everything from Motown to Sondheim to Presley to Hamlisch, belting, crooning, wailing.
Her big break came in 1968, when she was nineteen, in the off-Broadway production of Dames at Sea. She played a small-town chorus girl who tapped her way from the bus depot to stardom in a mere twenty-four hours. "Adorable," gasped The New York Times. She won acclaim in the 1972 revival of On the Town, again for her efforts in Mack & Mabel three years later. She then went to Hollywood, playing in a wide assortment of fast-breaking bubbles: The Longest Yard, W.C.Fields and Me, Silent Movie, and The Jerk, in which she costarred with Steve Martin, with whom she "has been going" for four years. This season she can be seen in two new pictures: Heartbeeps, in which she and Andy Kaufman cavort as robots, and Pennies from Heaven, in which she plays a music teacher engulfed by the hard times and elegant dreams of America in the Thirties.
With some effort you can learn that she was christened Bernadette Lazzara and was urged to the stage by her mother, Marge, with the tacit consent of her father, a strict, hardworking man who drove a bread truck. She reveals private details with great reluctance. She is direct to a point. Then the misty curtain drops. And she stares back, calmly waiting to turn aside the next query. Even before engaging in this exchange, she asked that it not be "in-depth."
She recalls her childhood in Queens. "We lived in a red...not brick, some kind of shingled house. It was a two-family house, divided upper and lower. We lived on the bottom, in six rooms, including a porch where my brother slept. I shared a bedroom with my older sister, Donna. I remember that Sunday was the important day, the family day. There was always a big meal. My father had to get up at one A.M. to go to work. He came home at three in the afternoon, ate, then went to bed. So we didn't see much of him except on Sunday.
"Was he a first generation American?"
"Yes. It's kind of a sad story. His mother came over from Italy and was married two years when she had him and his brother. Then her husband got sick and went back to Italy to get well. And he died there. She never remarried. Italian women didn't do that back then."
"And your mother?"
"You mean, what was she like?" A long pause. "A modern woman. That is, she's very independent. This would have been her time. Her father died when she was eleven, so I don't think she'd had a feminine thing built into her. She wanted to be an actress but wasn't allowed."
"Why did she encourage your career? Did she seek certain gratifications through you?"
"Well, a little bit, yeah. My sister, who's nine years older, took all kinds of classes, went to the High School of Performing Arts, took tap lessons and all. I would sometimes go with her, or when she'd come home she would teach me the steps."
"How would you describe yourself back then?"
She sits motionless. Though her expression shows no trace of annoyance, her appealing, girlish voice has an edge to it. "Why should I answer that?" she asks smiling. "It's going to be in an article."
"Yes, but we're talking about when you were thirteen. And you needn't reveal intimate details."
"Okay, but in what way do you mean?"
"Let's start with what you looked like back then."
"I was always a little bit overweight. But not a fat girl. My face was, um, okay. I didn't think I was that attractive. I wasn't an ugly girl, but I wasn't queen of the prom, either."
"Were you concerned with being popular?"
"Well, I was always sort of the second-best friend to the most popular girl. I guess it was important to me to be with the popular girls. I suppose I was a kind of mediator. When two kids were fighting I would say, 'Look, you don't really mean that,' and then, to the other one, 'Hey, you don't really mean that.' I was the kind of classmate who always tried to make things right between them."
[break time! but I'll be back shortly to finish]
| Karen
Registered User
Registered:
5/3/2002 | posted: 12/11/2005 at 7:55:04 PM ET
The conversation turns to show business. Here she is relaxed. She discusses her role in Pennies from Heaven. "I play a young woman who starts out as a shy teacher. A music salesman--he sells song sheets--sees me and falls in love on sight. The characters in the movie escape into their fantasies. They become the songs of the day. In the songs, everything is wonderful while their lives are very hard. They don't sing in their own voices, they sing in the voices of the records of the time. For instance, I sing in Helen Kane's voice, and Steve [Martin] in Bing Crosby's voice."
"So you live vicariously through the popular entertainers of the Thirties."
"Exactly."
"At any time in your own life, did you do the same? Strongly identify with certain music, lose yourself in certain songs?"
"When I was young, I used to do that with Frank Sinatra. No specific song, but the words to many of the songs he chose to sing. 'Only the Lonely,' for example."
Some minutes later she interrupts a thought to ask, with fervent curiosity, "What have you seen me in? What exactly have you seen me do?"
After listening to the answer--a couple of movies, one of her plays, a familiarity with her records--she observes that "there are many different perceptions of me, as far as the public is concerned. I realized recently that people live in different time slots. There are those who know me only from the TV series I did, All's Fair. Then there are those who only know my songs or my movies, or have only seen my nightclub act."
"You've played the big spots in Las Vegas, haven't you?"
"Yes, but not for a while."
"What's that like, playing Las Vegas?"
"Well, I like the performing but it's hard because you have three hours between shows. One's at eight and the second is midnight, if I remember correctly. I don't like to go out between them or eat, so I usually watch TV. The first night I slept but that's not a good idea because you have to get up and start singing again."
"Do you get nervous each time you go on?"
"No, except maybe on the first night of a new act, but never during a two-week run when the circumstances are the same time after time."
She shows little inclination to reflect on the nature of audiences. She asserts that the crowd almost always knows a good performance when it sees one and hardly ever overextends its appreciation past a performer's due.
On the subject of love, on the subject of marriage, on the subject of her own independence, she maintains her cool, moderate perspective. She says she is reading [the book] Cinderella Complex, which illuminates her own ambivalence.
"Sometimes I think marriage is what I want, and sometimes I think it's just a convention."
"But you're as good as married now, aren't you?"
"Yes, somewhat. But I'm very private about my private life."
"You're also private about your public life--though that's certainly a reasonable thing to be."
"In a way I feel that it actually serves the public better. If I give away too much, there won't be a whole person for them to see."
"That looks like an engagement ring on your hand."
"Doesn't it," she says with a mischievous grin. "But it's just a solitaire diamond set in a nice way."
Unwittingly, she could have been describing herself.
| jmslsu01
Registered User
Registered:
6/9/2003
From:
northern VA | posted: 12/11/2005 at 8:00:11 PM ET
Karen, thank you for posting that (long!) article. Very interesting.
Was her father a twin?
Jenn
|  GraceAnne
Registered User
Registered:
5/20/2004
From:
New York, NY | posted: 12/11/2005 at 9:01:13 PM ET
karen, you are such a doll for posting that. thank you so much.
 graceanne
p.s. inspired by karen's generosity, i just added 3 more pics to the flickr site. not nearly as cool as the esquire article, but better than nothing! here is the link...
pics
| Karen
Registered User
Registered:
5/3/2002 | posted: 12/11/2005 at 9:15:16 PM ET
Thanks guys.
I love those pictures. She's so super-sexy in the one with Peter Allen. And the one at Helen Hayes's birthday party could be captioned "little girl visiting old folks home."
|  Danielle
Registered User
Registered:
3/13/2008
From:
Houston, Texas
Fav. BP Song: Being Alive/ Move On
Fav. BP Show: Into The Woods
Fav. BP Character: The Witch
Fav. BP CD: Sondheim etc. etc.Live At Carnegie Hall
| posted: 5/31/2009 at 2:38:09 AM ET
This is one of my favourite articles.
bernadette kisses regis.
regis flinches.
"regis you're atwitter"
| | Other threads: « Next | Previous » |
Do you think this topic is inappropriate? Vote it down. After a thread receives a certain amount of negative votes it will be automatically locked.
Please contact us with any concerns you might have.
|
