The most wonderful thing in life is to fall in love with somebody and find out they have fallen in love with you. Well, possums, this miracle has happened to me! I have fallen in love with America, and it adores me back." So says Dame Edna, that international star who took Broadway by storm during the 2000 season with her Tony Award-winning show, Dame Edna: The Royal Tour.

Edna, who is the creation of writer-actor Barry Humphries, will launch another tour this fall. Entitled A Night with Dame Edna: The Family Tour, the production will begin at the Jackie Gleason Theatre in Miami, Florida, on Sept. 10. Stops in Boston, Connecticut and other venues in the U.S. and Canada are scheduled.

According to the Dame's official website, her tour, as of Aug. 8, includes the following venues:

Sept. 10-15 at the Jackie Gleason Theatre in Miami, FL
Sept. 17-22 at the Tampa Performing Arts Center in Tampa, FL
Sept. 26-Oct. 13 at the Colonial Theatre in Boston, MA
Oct. 15-20 at the Shubert Theatre in New Haven, CT
Oct. 24-Nov. 3 at the Ford Theatre in Vancouver, BC
Nov. 5-10 at the State Theatre in Minneapolis, MN
Nov. 12-17 at the Fox Theatre in St. Louis, MO
Jan. 21, 2003-Feb. 2 at the National Theatre in Washington, D.C.
Feb. 4-16 at the Forrest Theatre in Philadelphia, PA
Feb. 18-23 at the Bushnell Center in Hartford, CT
Dubbed Australia's First Lady, Dame Edna is the creation of Humphries, a successful character actor in Europe and Australia as well as an esteemed landscape painter. Some of Humphries' theatrical credits include roles in Waiting for Godot, Oliver! and Maggie May, but his most successful outings have been as Dame Edna, a character he created in 1956. Humphries was given the Order of Australia in 1982 and was endowed with an Honorary Doctorate of Griffith University in Australia in 1994.

For more information about the inimitible Dame, go to www.dame-edna.com. *

The New York Post reports that Humphries, who received a Special Event Tony Award in 2000 for Dame Edna: The Royal Tour, is at work on a new show, which he will produce himself. Producers for the Dame's Broadway debut at the "intimate" Booth Theatre included Leonard Soloway, Chase Mishkin, Steven M. Levy and Jonathan Reinis. That Broadway stint, the Post states, made a profit of $1.6 million, $950,000 of which went to the producers and $650,000 to Humphries.

—By Andrew Gans