Here Comes Bette! 1973
Newsweek Here Comes Bette! December 17, 1973 By Charles Michener When I’m out there, I work. If people are paying money, they’re entitled to see an artist work his buns off. I want to do something beautiful that will last forever. Maybe I’ll never do it, and maybe everyone will laugh at me and say, “She’s just a fool.” But I don’t think I am. It was a Fool’s entrance in the oldest, best sense. Suddenly, at the end of the long shaft of spotlight, Bette Midler was there-skittering across the stage of New York’s fabled Palace Theatre to the band’s fanfare and the huge applause, a tiny, spectacularly busty dress-up of a girl wearing a low-cut, shimmery taxi-dancer dress hiked up on one thigh, an orchid in her frizzed-up, fire-red hair, teetering scarlet platform shoes and a smile as big as a half-moon. As the applause died down, she grabbed the mike, her smile turned serious, and in the sudden hush she sang in a small, breathy voice: “And I am all...
