Miscellaneous
Reminiscing with LuPone
Stage icon’s cabaret act, here Saturday, inspires wide-ranging stories and memories
Patti LuPone says her gay friend Scott Wittman, who directs her cabaret act, is a personal and professional friend. (Photo courtesy UMD)
It’s a little tough coming up with questions for Broadway icon Patti LuPone. Her startlingly candid 2010 eponymous memoir is so unabashed at first it seems she left no obvious career stone unturned.
Some called it pessimistic and lacking in joy. Others reveled in its no-bullshit tone that, some said, was uncanny in its ability to make readers feel they were sitting on a barstool with LuPone over several rounds of no-holds-barred career anecdotes. That’s how it feels interviewing her. During a nearly hour-long phone conversation from her South Carolina beach home the weekend of Hurricane Irene, LuPone is loquacious and chatty. She balks at no question and riffs and rants much as one imagines she does with her friends. She can be merciless and lacerating with the gauche and ill-prepared — this is a woman who does not suffer fools gladly — but today she’s quick to laugh, happy to go anywhere the questions lead with the same degree of candor she incorporated in “Patti LuPone: a Memoir.”
LuPone, 62, says her outspokenness is “just how I’ve always been.” It didn’t particularly come with time.
“I’ve always been very candid and yes, it’s always gotten me in trouble to some degree. I just always think it’s important to tell one’s truth. It is what it is. It’s a difficult business and it’s a difficult business especially for a woman.”
Might her career have unfolded differently had she the unfailing politeness of, say, a Debbie Reynolds?
“I don’t think anything would be different,” LuPone says. “Because then I wouldn’t be me. It’s who I am. It’s the way I was brought up.”
This leads to a little philosophy. She rolls with it.
Do you think about “what if?” Isn’t a bit of that implied in the cabaret act, dubbed “Coulda, Woulda, Shoulda” that she’ll perform Saturday night at the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center at University of Maryland? (claricesmithcenter.umd.edu or 301-405-ARTS)
“It’s a futile way of thinking,” she says. “It’s just not who I am. It’s like [playwright] David Mamet says, it is as it is. The universe is unfolding. Why regret anything?”
LuPone admits she’s of the “everything-happens-for-a-reason” mindset.
The career slights have gotten easier the more she’s able to look back and trace the “pattern of my career.” The one constant has been surprise, she says. She long ago gave up trying to control it or determine its course. Almost for every disappointment there has been serendipity.
An example? She cites her chance to do “Sweeney Todd” in 2000, which started a chain of events that not only led to the 2005 Broadway revival of that show, but her chance to do several classic Sondheim roles with the Ravinia Festival over a six-year period that included Fosca in “Passion,” “Cora in “Anyone Can Whistle,” two roles in “Sunday in the Park with George” and, of course, Rose in “Gypsy,” for which she won her second Tony in 2009.
“I never thought in a million years, I would get to do that,” she says. “It never entered my mind. I hadn’t done Stephen Sondheim and had, by that time, kind of written it off and just figured that’s the way it goes. That led to the rest of my Sondheim roles and … by the end, I finally had my Sondheim canon. … That’s why I believe in destiny. If it’s to be, it will be.”
LuPone says the regret-tinged name of her act, which she’s been performing off and on for about four years, is meant to be taken whimsically, not as any big treatise on regret. The format is loose enough she and accompanist Joseph Thalken, can rotate material in and out as they wish.
“The beginning of my career, beginning with my childhood, that part doesn’t change, but the other songs we rotate a lot.” She calls director Scott Wittman, who’s gay, her “very, very dear friend” and says she’s “lucky to have him in my life both artistically and personally.”
With the business at hand — this weekend’s concert — duly addressed, LuPone is up for anything. She tackles a dizzying array of topics in our remaining moments.
She calls same-sex marriage in her beloved New York “loooooong overdue.”
“I’m thrilled to death and I’m sure I’ll be attending a lot of weddings,” she says. “This country is so insane sometimes, so tilted. I wish it would come back to its senses.”
That theater is so ephemeral and fleeting by nature doesn’t particularly bother her, she says. Despite last year’s book, she’s not particularly inclined to look back.
“I have all the cast recordings but I never put them on,” she says. “I have an archive and scrapbooks — that’s one of the things that made the book so much easier to do — … but I don’t even have a theater room really. I don’t go back and look. It’s a memory, a treasured memory, when I finish something. Besides, I can’t really look at myself. I’m not a big fan of me.”
She says having work-life balance, even in the arts, is important: “You have nothing to bring to the boards if you’re only living for the boards,” she says.
But does she care about her legacy since her greatest hits, so to speak, have been on the stage?
“Of course you care, but there’s plenty of stuff on YouTube. Besides, the memory of it is always better than the actual footage. You can’t really film a theatrical production adequately. Seeing them on camera just doesn’t do them justice.”
She admits she’s “had a beef for years” with big-name movie stars swooping onto Broadway for brief runs and special treatment that sometimes even wins them Tonys.
LuPone says for actors like her, who’ve made their career largely on stage, it’s highly frustrating.
“[The producers] will say, ‘Forget you, I can get so and so,’” she says. “But to do it well, you really have to have the chops for it, the years of training.”
It must be maddening too, when movie stars of dubious talent land film adaptations much more talented, but lesser known, stage stars originated, right?
LuPone says yes and no. She admits there are film “treasures” that can be “equally good, but other times the casting is really ridiculous.” It’s not just money, though. LuPone says some actors have talent that merely translates better to either the stage or screen as the case may be. The difference, largely, is projection, she says.
“If they have no talent and they’re in the movie musical, then yeah, of course I’m pissed off. But on stage you have to hit the balcony. The delivery is so much larger. Film is a much stiller medium. … People tell me I have a stage face. It’s too big for the camera, whatever that means.”
As soon as the words are out of her mouth, though, LuPone starts thinking of exceptions. She mentions international stars like Irene Papas and Anna Magnani who did well in film.
“You look at somebody like Irene and there’s no censure. We have a certain type in this country that just seems to be designated for film. It’s almost like the raw emotional power of a European actor is feared by Hollywood casting producers.”
As one would imagine, LuPone writes at length in her book about her experience on stage with Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Evita,” for which she won her first Tony. Curiously missing, though, is any mention of the 1996 film version with Madonna.
Yes, it’s true she was offered a cameo as Evita’s mother — LuPone laughs heartily recalling it — but it was for a previous incarnation of the film years before the Madonna version got off the ground. She claims not to have seen the Madonna version.
“I saw a little of it on the treadmill once,” she says. “It looked like a bore. There was no reason to see it.”
Broadway, she says, has suffered the same shortsightedness that also ails the recording industry and TV. Talent that doesn’t hit big right out of the gate nowadays is dead in the water.
“In the past there were producers who supported and nurtured young composers and lyricists, who developed them and stuck with them. I was able to grow with a lot of these young playwrights and the audience was able to grow too. Now Times Square looks like a tawdry Las Vegas and people don’t know what they’re looking for other than a chance to make a lot of money. … It’s the same thing with TV. I turn the TV on and just scream at my husband. It’s the most boring piece of shit and there’s more commercial time than there is dramatic time. Don’t even get me started on reality TV. It’s a bunch of coddling of stupid, ignorant people.”
While it doesn’t take much to get LuPone ranting and lamenting, neither is it hard to induce warmth and delight.
She’s thrilled to reunite with her “Evita” costar, Broadway legend Mandy Patinkin, for a joint show on Broadway this fall.
“It’s great,” she says. “Very rarely do you get to work with someone again. For the most part it doesn’t ever happen, at least for me. But with Mandy, are you kidding? I adore him. Hopefully we’ll sell.”
Miscellaneous
Stephen Miller’s legal group sues Fairfax County schools
Lawsuit challenges policies for transgender, nonbinary students
Former Trump administration official Stephen Miller’s legal group on Tuesday filed a lawsuit against the Fairfax County School District over its policies for transgender and nonbinary students.
America First Legal in a press release notes it filed the lawsuit against the school district on behalf of a female, “practicing Roman Catholic” student “for allowing teenage boys to use the female restrooms and for forcing a radical, government-sponsored gender indoctrination and approved-speech scheme that discriminates against students on the basis of sex and religion and violates their free speech rights under the Virginia Constitution.”
The lawsuit was filed in Fairfax County Circuit Court.
The Virginia Department of Education last July announced new guidelines for trans and nonbinary students for which Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin asked. Equality Virginia and other advocacy groups claim they, among other things, would forcibly out trans and nonbinary students.
Fairfax County schools are among the school districts that have refused to implement the guidelines.
“Fairfax County Public Schools appears to believe that its policies and regulations can override the Virginia Constitution’s protections for religious beliefs, speech and from government discrimination on the basis of sex and religious beliefs,” said America First legal Senior Advisor Ian Prior in a press release. “It is well past time for FCPS to stop sacrificing the constitutional rights of its students so that it can implement a state-sanctioned ideology that demands compliance in speech, beliefs and conduct.”
FCPS Pride, a group that represents the Fairfax County School District’s LGBTQ employees, described the lawsuit as “abhorrent.”
“We are confident that the school board and the superintendent will strongly and firmly oppose this specious suit and continue to support all students, including transgender and gender expansive students,” said the group in a press list.
Miscellaneous
More than a dozen LGBTQ candidates on the ballot in Va.
Control of the state Senate hangs in the balance
More than a dozen openly LGBTQ candidates are on the ballot in Virginia on Nov. 7.
State Del. Danica Roem (D-Manassas) is running against Republican Bill Woolf in the newly redistricted Senate District 30 that includes western Prince William County and the cities of Manassas and Manassas Park.
Roem in 2018 became the first openly transgender person seated in a state legislature in the U.S. after she defeated then-state Del. Bob Marshall, a prominent LGBTQ rights opponent who co-wrote Virginia’s constitutional amendment defining marriage as between a man and a woman. Roem would become Virginia’s first out trans state senator if she defeats Woolf.
Woolf supports a bill that would require school personnel to out trans students to their parents. The Republican Party of Virginia has highlighted this position in ads in support of Woolf.
“Thank you for reminding me why I won three elections in this district in Prince William County, which is the most diverse county in all of Virginia and the 10th most nationally where we welcome everyone because of who they are, not despite it, no matter what you look like, where you come from, how you worship, if you do, or who you love because you should be able to thrive here because of who you are, never despite it,” said Roem on Sept. 28 in response to a woman who heckled her during a debate with Woolf that took place at Metz Middle School in Manassas.
Gay state Sen. Adam Ebbin (D-Alexandria) is running for re-election in Senate District 39. State Del. Mark Sickles (D-Fairfax County), who is also gay, is running for re-election in House District 43.
Former state Del. Joshua Cole, who identifies as bisexual, is running against Republican Lee Peters in House District 65. State Del. Kelly Convirs-Fowler (D-Virginia Beach), who came out as bisexual last year at Hampton Roads Pride, will face Republican Mike Karslake and independent Nicholas Olenik.
State Del. Marcia “Cia” Price (D-Newport News), a Black woman who identifies as pansexual, is running for re-election in House District 85.
Adele McClure, a queer Democrat, is running to represent House District 2 that includes portions of Arlington County. Laura Jane Cohen, a bisexual woman who is a member of the Fairfax County School Board, is a House of Delegates candidate in House District 15.
Rozia Henson, a gay federal contractor who works for the Department of Homeland Security, is running in House District 19. Zach Coltrain, a gay Gen Zer, is running against state Del. Barry Knight (R-Virginia Beach) in House District 98.
LPAC has endorsed Jade Harris, a Rockbridge County Democrat who is running to represent Senate District 3. Harris’ website notes trans rights are part of their platform.
“Protecting trans rights, repealing right to work, strengthening unions and supporting our farmers are just a few of my legislative priorities,” reads the website. “I am dedicated to addressing the revitalization of our state’s infrastructure, fostering a favorable environment for job creation, and supporting our public education system.”
Republicans currently control the House by a 51-46 margin, while Democrats have a 21-19 majority in the state Senate.
Senate Democrats have successfully blocked anti-LGBTQ bills that Republicans have introduced since Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin took office in January 2022.
The Virginia Department of Education in July released new guidelines for trans and nonbinary students that activists and their supporters have sharply criticized. They fear that Republicans will curtail LGBTQ rights in the state if they regain control of both houses of the General Assembly on Nov. 7.
“Time and time again, anti-equality lawmakers and the Youngkin administration have made it clear that they will continue to disrespect and disregard the lives and lived experience of LGBTQ+ people within Virginia,” said Equality Virginia PAC Executive Director Narissa Rahaman in August when her organization and the Human Rights Campaign endorsed Roem, Ebbin and other “pro-equality champions.”
“We must elect pro-equality champions who will secure and strengthen our freedoms,” added Rahaman. “We have that chance as the eyes of the nation are on us this November.”
The LGBTQ+ Victory Fund has endorsed Fairfax County School Board Vice Chair Karl Frisch and Fairfax County School Board candidates Robyn Lady and Kyle McDaniel, who identify as lesbian and bisexual respectively.
Michael Pruitt would become the first openly bisexual man elected to the Albemarle County Board of Supervisors if he were to win on Nov. 7. Blacksburg Town Councilman Michael Sutphin and Big Stone Gay Town Councilman Tyler Hughes, who are both gay, are running for re-election.
“Tyler will be a critical voice for equality as the only out LGBTQ+ person on the Big Stone Gap Town Council,” says the Victory Fund on its website.
Cal Benn contributed to this article.
Miscellaneous
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Five easy tips to help you avoid common risks
Your home is more than just a place to eat and sleep; it’s your safe haven. As much as you might cherish your home, you should probably also recognize the potential hazards within its familiar walls. Accidents can happen in an instant, yet with a little foresight and some simple adjustments, you can transform your house into a safer haven.
Accidents can happen anywhere, and with a few simple tweaks, you can lower risks in your space. Below you’ll find five tips for each room in your home to help prevent injuries, falls, and other mishaps. In short, home safety.
This article was inspired by a shower in a rental we managed that began leaking through the kitchen ceiling below. If only the landlord had installed grab bars, right!? Below, we’ll guide you through the steps to fortify your bathroom, making it a place of relaxation without the fear of slips and falls. Then, we’ll venture into the room where the magic happens, where proper planning can ensure great nights and peaceful mornings. We’ll show you how to prevent accidents while you experiment becoming the next Gordon Ramsey. And we’ll include a few surprising solutions for those other rooms that hold their own unique hazards, offering solutions to safeguard against unexpected mishaps.
Bathroom Safety
Install Grab Bars: Adding grab bars near the shower and toilet can provide essential support for family members of all ages. Not only can they help with getting in and out, but they can help provide stability when washing. Make sure they are securely anchored to the wall.
Non-Slip Mats: Place non-slip mats inside the shower and bathtub to prevent slips. They’re a small investment that can save you from falls and head injuries.
Adjust Water Temperature: Ensure your hot water is set to a safe temperature to avoid scalding. The hot water heater should be set to around 120°F (49°C)l, the middle setting on many water heater settings.
Medicine Cabinet Locks: If you have young children, use childproof locks on your medicine cabinet to keep harmful substances out of reach.
Proper Lighting: Ensure there’s adequate lighting in the bathroom to avoid trips and falls during nighttime visits. Nightlights can be a simple and effective solution.
Bedroom Safety
Clear Pathways: Keep pathways in the bedroom clutter free to prevent tripping. Ensure there’s enough space to move around comfortably, particularly getting around the bed. Be aware where all furniture is when walking around to avoid stubbed toes, particularly at night.
Secure Rugs: If you have throw rugs, use rug grippers or double-sided tape to keep them from slipping. Loose rugs are a common trip hazard.
Bed Rails: For anyone at risk of falling out of bed, consider installing bed rails to provide extra support and prevent falls.
Nightstands with Drawers: Opt for nightstands with drawers to keep essential items. This reduces the need to get out of bed at night, minimizing the risk of falls, as you race to grab what you need and not lose a moment’s rest.
Fire Safety: Install battery-operated smoke detectors in the bedrooms if there are none. Make sure to install them 36 inches away from an air vent or the edge of a ceiling fan. Also six inches away from the joint between the wall and ceiling. And test smoke detectors regularly.
Kitchen Safety
Non-Slip Flooring: Choose slip-resistant rugs in the kitchen, especially in areas where spills are common. Mats near the sink and stove can also help and you can often buy them fairly cheaply at Costco.
Childproof Cabinets: If you have little ones, use childproof latches on cabinets and drawers to prevent them from accessing potentially hazardous items.
Anti-tip brackets: Install an anti-tip bracket behind the range. These are often used when children are in the home. Although they are less likely to open the oven door and use it as a step stool to get to the stove-top, adults can also benefit from installing these.
Adequate Lighting: Proper lighting is crucial in the kitchen to avoid accidents. Under-cabinet lighting can illuminate work areas effectively.
Secure Heavy Items: Ensure heavy pots and pans are stored at waist level to prevent straining or dropping them from high shelves.
Sharp Object Storage: Keep knives and other sharp objects in a secure drawer or block. And handle all sharp items with extreme care, even when washing and drying. These steps reduce the risk of accidental cuts.
Other Safety Tips
Furniture Anchors: Secure heavy furniture, like bookshelves and dressers, to the wall to prevent tip-overs, especially if you have young children.
Adequate Outlets: Check for damaged outlets and replace them promptly. Avoid overloading circuits with too many devices. Install placeholder plugs in outlets to prevent young curious fingers (or tongues?) from going inside an electrical outlet.
Stair Gates: If your home has stairs, install safety gates at the top and bottom to prevent falls, especially if you have toddlers or pets to keep them off of the stairs when you cannot monitor them.
Emergency Escape Plan: Develop and practice an emergency escape plan with your family, including a designated meeting place outside.
Carbon Monoxide Detector: If your home burns any fossil fuels for heating or appliances, install carbon monoxide detectors in common areas of your home to detect this odorless gas. The D.C. building codes require this if you use a fireplace or if you have an attached garage. In essence, if there is any potential source of carbon monoxide in the home, be sure to install these detectors.
Remember, a safer home not only prevents accidents but also provides peace of mind for you and your family. Implement these simple tips to create a secure environment in every room of your house.
With these practical tips and a few adjustments, you can significantly reduce the risk of injuries and falls in your home. Enjoy peace of mind in your now much safer haven.
Scott Bloom is owner and senior property manager of Columbia Property Management.
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