By Harry Haun Any kind of prompting would be understandable since the dame's show-length diatribe seems to be popping into her head at the moment of utterance. "It quite often is," she said, implying a certain Actors Studio Method in her madness. "You see my thought processes working here. Audiences like danger, and I think those moments of tension are funny." The dame delights when things don't go smoothly—as they never do when he tries to ride herd over poor souls plucked from the audience for on-stage participation.
"I'm going to finish this show if it kills me," she can be counted to say, between steadying slugs of port. She seems to be sweating bullets, but it's only the anxiety spritzing. "I tear up a bit," she said about dabbing under her rhinestone eyewear with considerable regularity. "I think it must have been intense anxiety tonight. I go through a lot of tissues when I'm on stage." Granted one can only discover Dame Edna once, but this particular "homecoming" does come close to putting her back on top of the mountain. "Well, whether I'm on the top of the mountain or scrambling up the slopes remains to be seen, but I just get this feeling that this is going to be my home for a while. It gives me a very nice feeling indeed."
By the time the press finished their interrogation, the house manager had locked up the theatre and the lingering scribes had to make their way to the stage door in near darkness. It was the last we saw of the shocking pink costume and matching purple hair that is Dame Edna Everage. What entered Sardi's, to the applause of all, 15 minutes later was her "accountant," "confidante" and, truth to tell, impersonator Barry Humphries, the Aussie actor and comic who has been getting into the skin of the ditzy dowager for eons. "He's not an interesting person," Dame Edna had alerted us, but he did offer up a fairly shocking tidbit about her. For all of her multi-layered, many-colored cover stories, Dame Edna Everage is only 48 years old, having been born in some degree of desperation as a sketch character in an extracurricular (!) event at Melbourne's Olympic Games in 1956.
"I'm extraordinarily well preserved," the 70-year-old actor hastened to add, "because I have a very successful pact with Satan. Very early on, a Faustian bargain was struck." When The Big Five-Oh rolls around, Humphries will celebrate accordingly, maybe "some charity event to celebrate the birth of Dame Edna, with all her possums gathered around." The specific cause of creation, he said, was a university revue that he wrote for another celebrated Australian, Zoe Caldwell. "She had a lot to do in that show, so the skit was given back to me. I had to play it as a kind of Melbourne housewife. All Edna did was talk about her home. She was very plain, very nervous and timid. She talked about her interior decoration and her family. The audience in Melbourne loved it, and I thought I'd revive that character one day, little knowing that almost 50 years later she'd still be here."
22 Nov 2004
Sardi's as a party site was a deliberate choice for Humphries. This was where he reveled in 1977 when he introduced Dame Edna to the American masses in something called Housewife/Superstar—until his producer, Arthur Cantor, came in with a long face and a devastating review from Richard Eder in The New York Times. "Barry described that opening night years ago," relayed Dick Cavett. "He didn't even know what Sardi's was. He went upstairs just as the reviews arrived. When he came back, there was no one here." Time and tastes have changed, and Humphries stayed late into the night, with friends and fans huddled lovingly close. Some were heard to wonder, "Where is Richard Eder now?"
