If Sally from Sondheim’s ‘Follies’ Had a Sassy Gay Friend

Brian Gallivan, the creator of the Sassy Gay Friend

It’s hard to imagine that Sally Durant Plummer doesn’t have a Sassy Gay Friend. After all, she’s the main character in Follies, a cult musical by Stephen Sondheim. And she’s been portrayed by iconic divas like Bernadette Peters (in the current Broadway revival) and Barbara Cook. Sally should be positively swarming with gay friends.

But she doesn’t have one. How else to explain Sally’s behavior? (Or that dress?) Clearly, she needs a Sassy Gay Friend — just like the popular Second City character-turned-pitchman — to set her straight, just the way he’s done for so many heroines of Shakespeare.

In Follies, the scene might go something like this.

Bernadette as Sally on Broadway

SALLY and BEN: How many mornings
Are there still to come!
How much time can we hope that there will be?
Not much time, but it's time enough for me —

SASSY GAY FRIEND: Stop it, stop it, stop it! What are you doing?

SALLY: Why, I’m staking everything on a chance at late-life happiness with Ben!

BEN: That’s right.

SASSY: I’m not talking to you — you already have a Sassy Gay Friend!

BEN: I do??

SASSY: Have you taken a good look at your wife lately? She’s like me in a dress. But back to you, Sally. How does your husband feel about your running away with Ben?

SALLY: He’ll just have to understand. Buddy always understands everything. (She stifles a yawn.)

SASSY: Right. Which is why it’s such a good idea to leave him, I guess.

SALLY: Well —

Bernadette with Ron Raines as Ben

SASSY: This isn’t the first time you and Ben were going to run off together, is it?

SALLY: Why, no. Thirty years ago, we were going to get married.

SASSY: Mm-hmmm. And how’d that work out for you?

SALLY: Uh … Ben threw me over for Phyllis.

SASSY: And what’s changed since the last time you and Ben saw each other?

SALLY: Why — I’m much wiser and more mature, now that I’ve spent 30 years sitting on my ass in the suburbs!

SASSY: Which naturally means you still have the figure of a 19-year-old showgirl?

SALLY: Er — well —

SASSY: Unless of course you’re Bernadette, in which case we’ll just suspend our disbelief for a couple of hours now, shall we?

BEN: I think Sally looks just fine.

SASSY: Don’t make me hurt you, Ben. Now Sally, tell me how you spend your mornings.

SALLY: Well, sometimes I stand in the middle of the floor, not going left, not going right.

SASSY: That’s because you’re depressed, girlfriend!

SALLY: I am?

SASSY: Trying putting Prozac in that coffee cup, sister!

SALLY: Mmm! It’s much tastier than Sweet’n’Low!

SASSY: Meanwhile, back to you, Ben. You’re not really going to leave Phyllis, are you?

BEN (humming thoughtfully): Leave her? Leave her? How could I leave her? Uh — maybe for a couple of nights.

SASSY: Sally’s talking about forever, Ben!

BEN: But that would be the end of my political career!

SALLY (as the Prozac takes effect): You’re really not very nice, Ben, are you? And to think I might have left the most patient, adorable husband in the history of Broadway musical comedy — I jeopardized the happiness of four people — just for a manipulative blowhard like you! What was I thinking?

SASSY: Say it with me, Sally. You were a stupid bitch.

SALLY: Ha! I was a stupid bitch!

SASSY: But not anymore! Now, you’re —

SALLY: I — I’m here?

SASSY: Say it!

SALLY (sings): I’ve run the gamut, A to Z
Three cheers and dammit, c’est la vie!
I got through all of last year, and I’m here.
Lord knows at least I was there, and I’m here!
Look who’s here!
I’m still here!

SASSY (aside, while SALLY brings down the house): And remember, folks, we owe it all to Prozac! It’s like MiO© liquid beverage enhancer with a prescription-strength kick!

THE END

Yes, if only Sally had a Sassy Gay Friend, or Prozac,
she might look very much like this:
Elaine Paige as Carlotta

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Paterno to Retire from Football, Run for Pope

In nomine Patris

His long record tarnished by a growing child-abuse scandal and accusations of a high-level cover-up, Penn State football coach Joe Paterno has announced plans to retire at the end of this season. His next step, sources say, will be a bid to be named Supreme Pontiff of the Roman Catholic Church.

“Joe believes that his experience — especially his most recent experience — is exactly what the Church needs,” said one friend. “He’s the right man with the right skills for the job.”

He knows from Hail Mary Passes.

In an unrelated development, Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain has announced his willingness to accept the post of Prime Minister of Italy, following Silvio Berlusconi’s resignation, which is expected to be announced this week.

Bunga bunga

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Bessie

In front of her old house — the new one is fancier.
Goliad, Texas, 1983.
Photo by WVM of a photo by WVM
*Retouched by Linc Madison*

It’s not so much a surprise that she has died — she was 92, after all — as the surprise of discovering she’s not there. Is it a coincidence that I woke with a start this morning, just as she died? I’ve known Elizabeth Pullam for longer than I’ve known anyone else. She started working for my family 74 years ago, when my mother was barely a year old, and she stopped — well, I guess she won’t be coming around on Friday morning.

She really didn’t want to stop. She was stubborn about it, and it’s only quite recently that my mother and aunt have been able to persuade her to join a party instead of serving. Bessie was old-fashioned in many ways, and her estimation of her place in society wasn’t exactly revolutionary. It took no less an occasion than the Bicentennial to compel her to sit down to a meal with me and my family; we had to wait decades before she’d do it again.

Bessie in 2006, with WVM and a platter of her famous fried chicken.
Photo by Letitia Robinson Barnhill

I call her my grandmother’s “housekeeper,” but the job description used by most people in Goliad is simply “maid.” She was valedictorian of her high-school class, and in another generation, she might have excelled in any of a number of careers. But she was who she was, in her own place and time, and the work she had, sustained her.

She’s always been there, more reliable than Minute Rice. I can’t imagine, much less remember, a world without her, and indeed one of my earliest memories is of Bessie. Yet it is, in its way, a memory of her absence.

Bessie and little David Dye, just as she and I used to walk.
Photo by Travis Dye

I had come to my grandparents’ house, not the one I knew best and longest, where my parents live today, but the old house. Bessie wasn’t there, and my grandmother and I went “looking” for her. Where might she be hiding? It was a game, I guess, because I remember looking in the coffee pot. (Bessie was little, but she wasn’t that little.)

Other memories of her run together, because they changed so little over 50 years. Bessie in the kitchen: singing hymns, frying chicken, baking squash. She took pleasure in cooking my favorite foods, she said, because I appreciated them. How could I not?

Bessie at the dinner table: telling me to mind my manners, to sit up straight (“Do you want to turn out like Julius Caesar?”), to use the right fork. Bessie around the house: grumbling over my haircut or some other accident of contemporary society.

Sometimes I’d sit with her in the kitchen and watch her as she cooked. As a boy I was interested simply because it’s interesting to watch anybody make anything; as a man I tried (I admit it) to pick up her secrets and take them back to my own kitchen.

Scenes from a Childhood
“Animal Crackers,” from The Bumper Book, 1952.
Illustrations by Eulalie

We’d talk while she worked, but she didn’t give away much about her own life (a discretion I intend to reflect here, as well). She asked about my life, and she took perhaps a greater interest in my girlfriends than I did. Years after I’d forgotten my second-grade crush, a girl named Anna Knott, Bessie remembered.

Sometimes I followed her around the house as she worked. Making a bed is easier with two people, she explained, and perhaps for that reason I don’t make my own bed very often. She had a way of smoothing the sheets that seemed symbolic, epic, as if she were wiping away our cares, too. And she didn’t so much clean things as arrange them more attractively: a stack here, a heap there. The place was tidier when she left it than it was before she got there, anyway. That’s how I clean house, too.

This year, there’s been a lot of talk about a movie, and the book on which it’s based, called The Help. I haven’t felt the necessity to try either, because in a sense I know the story already: I grew up with Bessie. The things I don’t know about her, I won’t learn from people who never met her.

And there are things I still don’t know. Only today, for example, did I learn that her first name was Charity.

Stories sounded better when Bessie read them.
“The Wee Kitten Who Sucked Her Thumb,” from The Bumper Book.

She’s helped to rear four generations of my family; she loved children, and we loved her. I can still hear the stories she read to me at night, and I can feel the washcloth she applied — firmly but not violently — to my little arms at bath time.

But she was good with older folks, too, and she nursed both my grandparents steadfastly. When illness made my grandfather (never an easy person) more difficult than ever, she bore his snaps and tirades — though she made a point of telling the rest of us that she did so only because she “knew he was sick and didn’t mean it.”

I understood the warning she meant to convey: Heaven forbid anybody else might speak to her that way!

She composed a song for me, a lullaby she sang when I was a tiny baby and often enough after. I had the satisfaction of hearing her sing it to my godson once, too: “You’re my friend, Bill, you’re my friend. / You’re my friend, Bill, ‘till the end.”

I can’t sing for her now, though I’m sure she’d be listening. So please allow Miss Mahalia Jackson to answer for me.



Postscript:

Here’s another rendition of the same song from Mahalia Jackson — I hesitated to post it with the entry, primarily because Bessie would never have let Miss Jackson go out looking like this. (“Fix your hair! Put on a nicer dress! Do you want Louis Armstrong to see you like that?”) But the power of her song is what I need right now, and you may need it, too.

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Andy Rooney

I can’t tell you whether Andy Rooney was, deep down, as scruffy and lovable as millions of TV viewers insisted he must be; I can’t tell you whether he really was the mean S.O.B. he appeared to be as he stumped up and down the halls of CBS in the 1990s. You don’t learn much about a man when your most intimate encounters are at the salad bar in the employee cafeteria. It’s true, Andy Rooney and I once reached for the same slice of tomato, but we never exchanged a word.

I was in a remarkably good position, however, to judge the esteem in which Rooney was held by others — and why he was, during his tenure as 60 Minutes’ resident crank, a dangerous, ultimately negative force in television news.

My first objection to Rooney is primarily aesthetic. Once Don Hewitt began to showcase Rooney’s ostensibly humorous, frequently pointless personal essays, a vast swath of the viewing public suddenly felt justified — compelled — entitled to pop off just the way Andy Rooney did on TV.

What a lovable old grouch really looks like.

I’m not saying that the real, overall population of gasbags increased in number as a result of Andy Rooney, but they certainly did come creeping out of the woodwork. This is of course a First Amendment right, but it isn’t much fun for the rest of us, who have to listen or read. Sifting through viewer mail and answering the phone (among my principal duties during my early years at the network), I was constantly regaled with rambling tirades that were quite consciously modeled on Rooney’s “A Few Minutes” feature.

Sometimes the intent was to audition. Sometimes it was merely to complain — about the political situation, about CBS News, about kids today — you name it. But other times the intent was less clear, least of all to the Rooney Wannabes.

Rooney’s rants frequently offered up backward thinking, innocently or unconsciously or even in a “Gee, ain’t I a stinker” sort of way, but no less unattractive and potentially destructive for all that. His many “accidental” or “misunderstood” or “misquoted” jabs at women and minorities are useful examples. As I say, legions of viewers, whose thinking and powers of expression were even less nuanced than Rooney’s would hear him and thereupon feel as if they, too, could begin speaking their creaky minds, just the way he did. After all, Andy Rooney could get away with it — why couldn’t they?

And get away with it, he did. After a routine attempt to suspend Rooney for a stupid, harmful remark about “homosexual unions” — made at the height of the AIDS crisis — resulted in a 20 percent drop in 60 Minutes’ ratings, to say nothing of a rise in angry calls and letters, the News Division was forced to cut short the punishment and bring Rooney back on the air. Ultimately, it wasn’t Rooney who got fired (he was never even threatened with dismissal), it was David Burke, the News Division president, who lost his job.

Whereupon Rooney became not just unaccountable but totally invulnerable.

And that, in turn, made him dangerous. Even flourishing in the starlight (or nuclear fallout) of Dan Rather’s apogee, as I did, I began to wonder about the pernicious effects of television celebrity on responsible journalism.

Everyone in the News Division grew wary of Rooney — which, as far as I can tell, suited him just fine, because I’ve never seen anybody who made less effort to be pleasant to his colleagues. The executives on Mahogany Row appeared absolutely terrorized by him, and lowlier minions gave him a wide berth in the hallways.

He may have been a perfectly terrific guy in private, and even a stopped clock is right, once in a while. I particularly admired his remark, during Laurence Tisch’s rampage through the network, that “CBS used to stand for the Columbia Broadcasting System; now it doesn’t stand for anything.”

Most days, however, he gave curmudgeons a bad name, and it’s a mercy he didn’t have anything more obnoxious to say. There would have been no way to stop him. And then even more Americans would have felt licensed to say obnoxious things, too — with even less discipline, concision, and point than Andy Rooney ever knew.

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Alexander Hamilton’s Grange

You’d never know it wasn’t closed.

Alexander Hamilton is known to have owned only one house, a fine-looking country mansion that hearkens just a bit to his Caribbean roots and that once commanded views of both the Hudson and the East Rivers from a point between what are now known as Harlem and Washington Heights. The neighborhood is known (to some) as Hamilton Heights, in fact, and numberless things here are named after him — almost as if invoking Hamilton might result in a flurry of $10 bills like manna from the heavens. But for a long time the house wasn’t accorded the celebrity or prestige that the homes of other Founding Fathers enjoy.

Moved from its original position to a site next-door to a church, on Convent Avenue, the Grange served for a while as a chapel. Starting in 1924, apparently, the Grange housed a Hamilton museum, under one aegis or another, but crammed in among other buildings as it was, it didn’t stand out, and I walked past it many times without ever noticing it.

Then somebody got the bright idea of moving the Grange once again, to St. Nicolas Park around the corner. This latest move took place in 2008, while I was in France. News coverage of the period makes clear that this was quite a spectacle, and I’m sorry to have missed it. Then yesterday I happened upon the place.

If you visit without the sort of portable device that allows you access to the Internet, and the National Park Service web pages devoted to the Grange, you will not be able to find out the open hours of the Grange museum. You will not even be able to tell which is the door you ought to use to go inside — and so you will lurk around the outside, as I did.

However, if you have the sort of portable device that allows you to take photographs with a cellular telephone — as I do now — at least you can take a few pictures. The lighting was indifferent and the photographer is of very, very limited talent and ability, but at least you’ll get an idea of the place, and of why I expect I’ll drop by again soon.

Yet I found myself glad that poor old Mr. Hamilton no longer lives in the Grange. Think of all the Jeffersonians — and Jacksonians (both the Andy and the Jesse varieties) — and the Obamites, too — who live in the neighborhood! Hamilton would probably spend all of his time on the porch there, like Clint Eastwood in Gran Torino, with a shotgun across his lap.

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Make Money by Running for President!

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Find out how easy it is to boost your earning power by running for president! At American Political Trade Schools, more than ten million men and women** have trained for job promotion and new careers without having any serious political convictions — or any ideas at all.

Just one of our successful graduates

Compare your present salary with the money you could be making if only you were getting free media coverage round-the-clock! It only takes a few weeks, and best of all, you won’t have to pay for your own meals.

You don’t even have to quit your regular job! Just look at successful APTS graduates like Herman Cain, who’s been quote-unquote “campaigning” while on a book tour. Or Donald Trump, who got his lucrative TV show renewed — without even completing our APTS course.*** Sarah Palin maintained a top-earning career in book publishing and on TV, while other people got paid to discuss her political plans.

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Choose from any of these great APTS courses:

• Gladhanding


• Grandstanding


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Just get a pencil and paper right now, and write down this toll-free number. There’s absolutely no obligation, and no salesman will visit you (unless you count Roger Ailes).

Don’t turn away — call today! For just pennies a week, you could be on your way to a brighter tomorrow!



*NOTE: Paid celebrity endorsement.

**Not all statements have been verified. See? You’re acting like politicians already!

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I Always Cry at Same-Sex Weddings

Titanium: Their hands will go on.

Yesterday, after all the many happy occasions made unnecessarily bittersweet, all the countless connubial conclaves where I felt conspicuous — or left-out — or altogether superfluous — here at last, I thought, things would be different.

For once, I wouldn’t be the only one at the wedding.

Alas, Dan’s family quickly made it clear to me: I alone, out of everyone in the room, was not a St. Louis Cardinals fan.

The Gullers are perhaps the biggest boosters St. Louis has ever known. When Dan has come to Paris, we have had to visit all sorts of shrines to Saint Louis, which doesn’t leave time for much else but at least covers the Berthillon ice cream parlor on the Ile-Saint-Louis. Now we were in Connecticut, treated to little hors d’œuvres that, because they were so tasty, the cater–waiter explained, were called “St. Louis Ravioli.”

I resisted the urge to ask whether they were stuffed with cardinals.

The grooms and their parents.

Meanwhile, Eric, whose own, erstwhile career as a cater–waiter was long and distinguished, managed somehow not to jump in and start serving hors d’œuvres, too.

Beyond all that, however, I noticed plenty of people who are in many ways quite a bit like me. For this was the first gay wedding I’d ever attended, the legal union of my friends Eric and Dan.

Which is it? It all depends on whom you ask, I guess.

This at last was a bit — not all, but a bit — of what we as a tribe have spent years marching for and what we as a nation have been arguing over. Yet in the event, it didn’t seem like such a big deal. The earth did not at any point tilt off its axis. Sure, there was an historically premature snowstorm on Saturday, and Eric and Dan lost electricity at the home they share, but that didn’t seem like God’s wrath so much as a kind of warning: “See how much trouble I could cause if I wanted to bust up this party?”

No, the dead did not rise from their graves on Sunday, as Patrick observed, and the children present fell into temptations no more dire than the urge to sneak an extra piece of Halloween candy; the sun shone bright, and the skies stayed clear. All of Connecticut seemed to smile on the happy couple. This was a wedding not so unlike any other.

For once, the only one left out in the cold was this little fellow.

What made it distinctive was not that the couple joining hands was endowed with two sets of XY chromosomes. That didn’t matter — it couldn’t matter to anybody who saw the expression on Dan’s face when the rings were exchanged and he looked into Eric’s eyes: “We did it!” he seemed to say, in a way that made you want to — that made it impossible not to — celebrate along with them.

No, to understand what made this wedding its own special event, you had to look to the officiants, a rabbi and a preacher, because this is in at least one regard a mixed marriage, and because Eric and Dan believe in a God who believes in love.

The music made a difference, too. Both Eric and Dan have theatrical backgrounds, and both were part of the cabal that performs Forever Plaid, a musical in which the close harmonies demand a high degree of musicianship: you can’t hire just anybody, and at any given moment, there’s been a select pool of talent available. Eric and Dan never appeared in the same production of Forever Plaid, because both played the same role: Smudge, the left-handed geek of the quartet, who consistently leads with the wrong foot and gets all the choreography backwards.

A matched set, really.

So it was that we got terrific music, including “Can’t Help Lovin’ That Man” as sung by the cantor, tributes in song by several friends, and a chorus with half a dozen Plaid veterans; and, instead of any more conventional bridal march, we got “Three Coins in the Fountain.” And so it was that, to herald the couple’s arrival at dinner after the ceremony, we got a brilliantly executed music video, in which Eric and Dan performed the Bruno Mars song, “I Think I Wanna Marry You.”

While mystified as much as ever by the very concept of marriage, I also felt as happy as I ever have at any friends’ wedding. Yes, it’s true that in the past I always used to be an outsider. No matter the warmth of the embrace of my friends or the joy of the moment, I stood on the sidelines, looking on, a disinterested observer. Couples exchanged vows and rings and futures; these things have lasted or not, and yet I always knew that, whatever happened, it wasn’t ever going to be a part of my experience. Now — who knows?

And you know what? It Gets Better.

For as I watched Eric and Dan, I understood the mettle of their bond. Ask most people what that is, and they’re liable to mishear you: “It’s gold,” they’ll say, or in Eric and Dan’s case, “Titanium.”

And yet that’s not exactly their case, in fact, because the mettle was forged before Sunday, and if it’s a mineral at all, it’s graphite — a smudge, identical along two left hands that now bear rings. And be advised: it will last, but it will rub off.

Onto others.

For Eric and Dan, as for the rest of us, the adventure is just beginning.

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