A View From a Broad Read Free Page B

the perils that can befall a young woman of my station and bodily proportions. “The road!” Miss Frank proclaims each time we go on tour. “Why, it’s the Devil’s Walkway, and anyone who trods it is bound to Hula in Hell.” Well, what can you do? She’s such a good dresser. It must be all those steeples in Boston. But then again, who knows? Certainly not 1.1 know nothing, despite my avid thirst for knowledge and enlightenment. While others study, explore, experience, I go to fittings.
    But be that as it may. In those early, dark days of rehearsal, only my new Harlettes—Katie, Franny and Linda—gave me comfort. From the very first moment I discovered them, selling their cherries at the Farmers’ Market, they never let me down. I had to find new background singers for my Grand Tour, because my old ones had decided to find fame and fortune on their own. I was pissed, but not surprised. You know me: Bette Midler, brood hen to the stars—Barry Manilow, Melissa Manchester, the Platform Shoe. And actually, I adored my new threesome. When others turned their backs on this hapless Diva, my Harlettes did what they could to shore me up against the tidal waves of depression that threatened to engulf the vast, cold spaces of Rehearsal Hall 6. For not only were my girls fine singers and dancers, they also thought I was God.
    Oh, those girls! My three favorite chotchkes on the breakfront of life! I’ll never forget how they looked when I first saw them— so flushed, so filthy. But I knew, even then, that under those dirt-streaked, rouge-stained cheeks, there was Magic.
    The shocking verbal abuse they hurled at me when I first approached them only made me more certain I was right. I could do so much with them, I thought. And for them. Duty was not the exclusive province of Miss Frank. I would be more than their employer, I would be their Benefactress. I would raise them out of the gutter, nourish their minds, their souls, be privy to the elevation of their spirits. I would see them become noble and thin . . . God, I love a Mission!
    But even they could not keep me from my rendezvous with misery, for my most pressing problem was one that only I could solve. What I needed to make life worth living again was simply this: an Entrance. I have always believed that the way you first appear on stage is the way the audience will remember you for the rest of the show—perhaps, if they are the sensitive type, for the rest of their lives. Keeping this in mind, I had, on previous outings, come as a clam, as a jukebox and as a patient in a hospital bed—which was not, may I take this opportunity to say, a cheap and tasteless plea for audience sympathy, as some benighted critics have charged, but rather a bold foray into the political arena which contained within its small but swollen framework a thoughtful, even angry cry for socialized medicine.
    In any case, for this new and most important of tours I needed something different; something wonderful and astonishing, yet easy to pack. Something with a message from me to all the peoples of the world. Something, above all, that would be seen as unmistakably American. I imagined myself as the Long Island Expressway; as the Grand Canyon; as a Q-Tip. But all that seemed too expected, too Holiday on Ice, if you dig my drift.
    For days I feverishly racked my brain for an answer to this question of questions. Then, one afternoon, whilst I was preparing some Oscar Meyers in the kitchen, I happened to overhear the Red Sox game that Miss Frank—half deaf from endless hours of band rehearsal—had blasting on the tube. Suddenly, I realized that the answer was lying—or in this case, frying—right before my eyes.
    I would come as a Hot Dog!
    How brilliant! How perfect! First I’d have my girls come on as waitresses. Then I would make my grand entrance, mustard and relish glistening in the lights. I would shake my wiener, wiggle my buns. How could anyone resist such a delectable vision?
    There