Hello from delicious First Class!

I so love getting my Elite status on Continental because I've been getting fabulous upgrades. Last Sunday night, I flew home from Pittsburgh, and then Monday morning I had to take a 6:45 AM flight to West Palm Beach. I found out Sunday night that I was getting an upgrade, and the only thing that got me up the next morning was looking forward to shoveling delicious first-class food into my gullet. Mmmm. I was flying down to Florida because the Kravis Center asked me to promote the upcoming Broadway musicals that are coming to their theatre over the next year. So, I prepared a special deconstruction show featuring The Addams Family, Les Miz, La Cage Aux Folles, Come Fly Away and Hair. For The Addams Family I played a recording of Doug Sills in The Scarlet Pimpernel to demonstrate how amazing he is (he's playing Gomez in the tour), and then I played the ending of "The Moon and Me" to show how pretty the song and how amazing the Uncle Fester high C is. For Les Miz I played the beautiful high B flat that Cosette has to sing incredibly quietly at the end of "A Heart Full of Love." I mentioned how difficult it is to sing and how it's worth it to see the show just to she if she cracks. Listen to Judy Kuhn nail it! For Hair I told everyone how it was the first Broadway show I saw (at age four) and how James and I took Juli to see it when she was eight (she loved it). I also played a medley of the phenomenal high belting that the character of Dionne has to do. Dionne was originally the brilliant Melba Moore, so I told the story of when she was first offered the show. Galt MacDermot (the composer) heard her in a studio session and wanted her to be in the new Broadway company (Hair had opened Off-Broadway and was about to transfer). He approached her after her session and asked her, very excitedly, "How would you like to do Hair on Broadway?" She glared and responded, "I didn't go to four years of music school to do nobody's hair on Broadway!" Sass! Listen to her brilliance: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mJ_B6yCNbU

	Jerry Herman

I also found a way to promote my upcoming April show at the Kravis (and coming to the Broward Center as well). I'm doing Seth's Big Fat 70's Show where I deconstruct 70's variety shows as well as myself, so for La Cage Aux Folles I talked about how amazing Jerry Herman's music is and how nothing could ever sully it. Except…I then proceeded to show the video of Florence Henderson singing "The Best Of Times" during a live variety show, with a full body shot of her tripping onstage. Anybody tripping is usually hilarious, but it was made more so when she told me what really happened during a Chatterbox. Siegfried and Roy had performed right before her and one of their tigers peed on the stage! When she stepped into that puddle, she went a-skidding. Since I didn't want to only dish other people, I also showed the old video of me jazz dancing to that Jerry Herman classic, "I Am What I Am." There are so many things to deconstruct about that video but just imagine a 17-year-old me in purple plastic jazz pants, black leg warmers and white Capezio jazz shoes. Why not black Capezios, you ask? Because white draws the eye and makes for a better line. Next question.

Anyhoo, after my Kravis presentation the audience told me how excited they were for the various musicals and, hopefully, they bought tickets for all of them. Speaking of musicals, I've done A Chorus Line a few times, and last week in Pittsburgh I ran into one of my former Maggies. Sharon Schaller (nee Connelly) and I did it at Candlewood Playhouse back in 1993 (or 4, can't remember). We laughed our heads off remembering how she got in trouble because she wore an orange shade of lipstick. The director/choreographer was outraged and told her during an angry note session, "Maggie isn't a clown!" For the rest of the run, we kept riffing on that idea and decided that Maggie actually does show up in full circus regalia to show off her clowning skills. First, we'd demonstrate her trying to do the opening choreography with crazy extra large clown shoes on, (incredibly awkward), then we decided that when she's not dancing, Maggie is perched on a unicycle. So, whenever the dancers are standing in the famous line, she's in the signature Maggie pose, but she has to constantly keep pedaling the unicycle front and back so she can keep from falling off. Then, at the end of the show, when Maggie doesn't get the gig and has to exit with the other dancers, we see them leave the stage in total silence…except for the squeakity-squawkity of her unicycle being ridden offstage.