I just did a quick browse to see if anyone had already written a tribute to the late great actress and found this recent diary, Tuesday Night at the Theater: Elaine Stritch at Liberty. Well, as someone who often sat at the next bar stool witnessing rehearsals for "At Liberty" thirty years before she took the show to Broadway, I've got to say something.
We originally became friends, running out for drinks together while rehearsing an industrial one off in either the late 70's early 80's, hard to tell because those were cloudy years, Elaine Stritch and I were drinking buddies, the showgirl and the stagehand. At that young age sitting at the next bar stool and hearing stories about performing the same activity in Broadway dressing rooms with Judy Garland, well Elaine Stritch was one great story teller.
A few years later, in the 1986 with Elaine already sobered up, we worked together for about fifteen weeks on an ill fated "The Ellen Burstyn Show" where I also got to Megan Mullally playing Elaine's teenage grand daughter. By that time the expression "To know me is to love me" applied. The NYT obituary was being a little gentle with "impatient with fools and foolishness" But I can clearly recall that someone had to get nasty with Elaine to see that side of her. I can clearly recall that If you wanted to to know her, she wanted to know you.
Our paths would cross many time over the years. We would run into each other working on the occasional benefit revival and other assorted one night stands. Not very close without the bond of drinking, until I finally gave up drinking and then she was there for me. At each of these assorted star studded galas, through several decades, there would be a lunch or a dressing room visit filled with great stories of forgotten Broadway. For me the joy of Elaine Stritch was offstage, that she had seen and done it all and could articulate everything she had seen so well.
I did get to spend a good amount of time with Elaine in recent years. I loaded "At Liberty" into the Neil Simon Theater and worked the rehearsals up to opening night. We got to talk a great deal during those three weeks or a month, so many memories. I should tell you all of those stories but, if you have two hours and twenty five minutes to kill, you can see them all here and told by a far better story teller that I.
I will close out with the last time I saw Elaine Stritch. It was in 2010, just after to curtain calls for Stephen Sondheim's 80 Birthday Party. On an elevator in Avery Fisher Hall filled with heavy hitters, Elaine pinched my cheek and told Stephen Sondheim how much she loved me. As I got off at the stage level she called out "What have you been doing all these years?" I pointed to Michael Cerveris to say "I got to spend two years with Michael on Titanic" but Elaine interrupted me and just before the elevator doors closed she shouted "Whatever you've been doing, keep doing it. Because you like great."
Elaine Stritch, she's still here.