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RuPaul thanks her fairy godmother! The NYC Pride fiasco!
Michael Musto dishes on RuPaul's NYC club days, Bette Midler's bathhouse beginnings, & the drama with NYC Pride this year.
Author James St. James and I remember the time in the 1980s when a young RuPaul came up to us at the New Music Seminar in New York and informed us that he was going to be world famous. I let out a giggle—since Ru’s energy was infectious—yet inwardly rolled my eyes because people said that kind of thing to me all the time and I knew that fame wasn’t quite as easy to attain as it seemed to the uninitiated. It was much simpler to run around crowing “I’m going to be huge” than to actually accomplish it—and as a NYC columnist, I heard that phrase constantly from up-and-coming entertainers filled with the bravado of a young Fanny Brice.
But party thrower extraordinaire Susanne Bartsch apparently knew the score better than I did. Bartsch—the Swiss miss who has led a conga line of diverse partiers for decades—has a book coming out at the end of May called Bartschland, Tales of New York City Nightlife.
In the foreword, RuPaul writes about Bartsch, “We first met when I was hired as a go-go dancer at her Tuesday night party called Savage. When she entered the room, she hovered over the crowd like a magical fairy, sprinkling excitement on everyone in the club…By the time she made it over to me, her first words were ‘You’re a popstar’. I was thrilled and honored that the Queen of the Night had dubbed me the very thing I had come to Manhattan to be!”
Work, supermodel. That moment turned out to be the real Glinda/Dorothy Gale benediction.
But ya’ got to have gays…
And that’s not the end of the icon-making fairy dust.
Another glittery tome to look for next month is On Bette Midler: An Opinionated Guide by Kevin Winkler, and naturally it’s full of “hocus pocus”. In fact, it turns out that without various gays working their wizardry on Bette in her early days, the multitalented diva would not have had much wind beneath her wings.
The book details how, when Bette was performing for toweled queens at the Continental Baths in the 1970s, Bill Hennessy—a hairdresser from Broadway’s Fiddler on the Roof, which Bette had appeared in—helped her out with song suggestions, campy advice, and drag queen jokes. Her (then closeted) accompanist, Barry Manilow, was also invaluable, as was gag writer Bruce Vilanch, who’s always been gayer than Ikea on Super Bowl Sunday.
And so was Theatre of the Absurd star Charles Ludlam, whose off-Broadway shows Bette thought were a scream—though she loved the idea of developing a cabaret act that could have her playing herself (and wild extensions thereof) rather than stick to any kind of theater script.
Anyway, yay for gays. You’re welcome, Bette.
Everything from A to Zien
Broadway toasted its own icon in April, when Sardi’s unveiled a portrait of Chip Zien, who was the original Baker in Into The Woods and just this year played the Rabbi in Harmony (the Barry Manilow/Bruce Sussman musical about a singing group at odds during the holocaust), for which he got his best reviews ever.
At the unveiling, Zien told me, “This room is filled with everyone I’ve ever known.” It made him nervous, he said, because he’s a worrier; in fact, his most repeated line comes from Falsettos, which he was also in: “I worry a lot, I worry a lot, I worry a lot.”
I reminded the nimble actor that he basically had to have a breakdown on stage every night when Harmony was running. “I loved it,” he said. “It focused my days to have a show every night, and as for the breakdown, I figured, ‘Might as well do it in something worthwhile.”
Before I left to have my own emotional collapse, I made sure to catch up with the delightful Joanna Gleason, who won a Tony as the Baker’s Wife opposite Zien, way back in 1987. We reminisced about that year’s post-Tony awards press conference at this very restaurant, and she reminded me that Nick & Nora also had an opening night fest there. I looked uncomfortable at the mention of the show—I liked it, but it was a huge flop—but Joanna smiled and said, “I met [husband] Chris Sarandon in that show and we’ve been together 33 years!”
That’s the kind of flop we could all use.
And now the bad Pride news…
I hear NYC’s Heritage of Pride has lost so much corporate sponsorship that this year there will not be the usual rally, nor the Pride Island concert event (though the PrideFest street fair and the march will take place on Pride Sunday–June 30–as per usual). Also, a June 26th Carnegie Hall concert event for Pride, co-produced by writer Nathan James—with NYC Pride as a presenting partner—is now dead in the water because corporations have refused to support it.
After various effective MAGA boycotts hurt companies that promote queer rights, some corporations are running scared, peeling back a lot of the sponsorship that had been achieved through the years. And this trend doesn’t just affect NYC; it’s hit Pride events all around the country, as various events get canceled for lack of money. (I hear that Philadelphia’s Pride, for one, is being scaled back from what it’s been. The same goes for some West Coast Prides.)
NYC Pride didn’t respond to my request for comment, but Nathan James did. He said the Carnegie Hall concert was going to be the 10th anniversary of a groundbreaking 2014 concert he co-produced there.
“[Performer] Tym Moss and I started planning it,” he said. “We went for the usual corporate support we got for past years. We reached out to corporate America—I don’t want to mention sponsors by name–but as January became February became March, any support dried up.”
It’s always been somewhat controversial for corporations to back Pride events. So why the extra cautiousness right now? “I think it’s because of the political climate that’s going on,” said Nathan.
“I was very shocked and gobsmacked that Heritage of Pride had to drop their two signature events because of lack of funds. I feel that some pressure has been borne to bear. Remember what Bud Lite, Sports Illustrated and Target went through last year? Corporations are looking at that and looking at the consequences of the customers’ reactions and that is a factor in their thinking now. It’s a massive weather change and we’re moving backwards at an alarming rate.”
Yikes! I worry a lot, I worry a lot, I worry a lot. But Nathan says he plans to mount the concert next year, this time aiming for grassroots support. It’s possible that the activist group Reclaim Pride, which is doing the sixth annual Queer Liberation March on June 30, has had the right idea from the beginning. Knowing what fair weather friends corporations can be, the NYC event routinely refuses to include them at all.
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