Hasta La Gadget!

WASHINGTON — As Congress considers rolling back a law meant to protect unaccompanied minors from being summarily deported to unsafe countries, protesters rallied outside the White House on Thursday, calling on President Barack Obama to stand up for the children.

They carried signs denouncing the idea of expediting deportations. “Ni una mas deportacion,” one sign read — not one more deportation.

“You ran on a campaign of hope!” cried one protester as the crowd cheered. “Where is the hope for these children?”

The demonstration was organized by Amnesty International and immigration advocates We Belong Together, with support from multiple other groups, including the Central American Resource Center and the children’s advocacy group First Focus.

Joanne Lin shared stories of individual children who risked the treacherous journey across the U.S. border. Lin works as a legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union, another group supporting the rally.

“These stories are horrible,” she said. “They are stories about young girls and boys who have escaped gang rape, forced prostitution, forced gang recruitment. They are fleeing just horrid conditions. The governments there are not able to protect their children from violence, and we are so concerned that children who qualify for refugee status or humanitarian relief are going to be sent back to their destruction and demise.”

Since October 2013, more than 57,000 unaccompanied children have crossed the southern U.S. border, including many from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras.

Congressional lawmakers are now considering changes to the 2008 law that requires a hearing in front of an immigration judge before unaccompanied minors from countries other than Canada and Mexico can be deported. Republican leaders have already indicated they want to tie changes to that law to any additional funding for dealing with the border crisis. Democrats have said they will resist, but the White House has remained open to amending the law given the current influx of children.

Protesters on Thursday emphasized the horrors that pushed these children to flee.

“Poverty in itself is not a factor,” said Abel Nunez, executive director of the Central American Resource Center. “It is the violence — gang violence, cartel violence, criminality — and it extends from various factors, including the legacy of civil wars that the U.S. played a role in.”

The activists argued that putting thousands of minors on one-way flights back home is not the answer.

“The reason why we have this bottlenecking at the border is that we are trying to determine what is in the best interest of the child. The fact that it is inconvenient right now — I don’t think it’s an excuse for the nation not to put resources behind it,” Nunez said.

He deplored the political in-fighting on this issue. “Both parties are trying to figure out what fits them best politically,” Nunez said, “and who they are sacrificing are the children.”

I met her in November 1988. She was guest-starring on an episode of a short-lived NBC television series called Tattinger’s. A one-shot playing star Stephen Collins’ mother Franny, a seen-it-all former Broadway chorus girl. Cinch casting. And among the first of the many guest-starring tough mama roles that became her bread and butter in the decades ahead.

At the time I was a theatre guy trying to learn what I could about how television is made, hanging out on the set at the generous invitation of Tom Fontana, Tattinger’s creator and exec producer. Elaine Stritch was a Broadway legend. Of a certain age, trailing a difficult reputation (drinking, obstreperous behavior, narcissism). She had recently given up booze and was trying to remake her career in the United States after a number of years living and working in London.

There she’d had a four-year run on a 1970s sitcom called Two’s Company, playing an American author living in London, who needs to hire a butler and does. That was pretty much the show. Lightweight, a footnote even at the time, but that’s where I first encountered Elaine Stritch, thanks to my dad. I was home from colliege and he’d stumbled across an episode of Two’s Company being rebroadcast on PBS.

I could hear him calling from down the hall. “Bill! Come in here. You’ve got to see this woman.”

He knew me well. I did have to see that woman.

The show was funny enough. But that voice. That timing. That delivery. Even in a middling British TV import, this was an actress who immediately established the most basic fact about her: She would not be be ignored.

I knew nothing of Stritch’s stage work that night but within a couple of years I was catapulted up to speed. As it did for many people all it took for me was hearing her historic recording of “The Ladies Who Lunch,” from the original cast album of Stephen Sondheim’s Company, a stark look at marriage in America, set to music. I was a rising junior preparing to audition for a college production of Company (I know, a college production of Company). But I was galvanized. There it was again. That voice. That timing. That delivery.

My infatuation became insatiable after the watching her steal the show from a boatload of Broadway stars in the PBS airing of “Follies” in Concert in 1985.

Again, utter flabbergastration. Not a word. But the only one that will do.

So when I spotted her pacing the soundstage of Tattinger’s before her first scene was to be filmed, I had to introduce myself. If only to hear the words “Get away from me, you fawning stagestruck sycophant, can’t you see I’m working?” hurled my way with that voice, that timing, that delivery.

But that’s not what she said.

Once I’d introduced myself and told Elaine Stritch — eloquently I thought, in as non-sycophanty a manner as possible — how much I enjoyed her work, not as a mere fan but an informed connoisseur of her oeuvre, she stopped her fretful pacing. She smiled at me, hesitantly, seeming almost relieved. But only for an instant. That’s all it took for her to clutch my arm as if puncturing a life preserver and erupt.

“I have NO FUCKING IDEA how to play this mother. None! And no one will help me. Nobody. Not the director, not the writer, they’re all too busy. I’m from the theatre, you know that, why don’t they? I need backstory, history, some sense of who this woman is. How can they expect a performance from this,” she said, rattling her script as if the dialogue were printed in dog shit.

“Who the HELL is this woman? Fucking television.”

It was as if heaven itself had opened up and swallowed me whole. And then she was gone, called away by an assistant director.

Of course I watched her film her scenes. I wasn’t about to miss my first chance to see Elaine Stritch perform live. Even if it was in an underwritten guest role in a television series that wouldn’t last 13 episodes.

She was a total pro.

As Elaine Stritch was leaving for the day, she spotted me in the hallway outside the makeup room, called me aside and asked how I thought she’d done. I told her she was great.

“Bullshit. But thanks.”

She asked if I’d mind doing her a favor. Her car was waiting in the parking lot and she didn’t want to keep him waiting. She handed me a small envelope, told me it contained a $20 tip for her dresser (“Do you think that’s enough?”) and asked if I’d deliver it for her.

It was more than enough. Tipping your dresser is a theatre tradition rarely observed by TV actors.

After delivering Elaine Stritch’s tip, I was walking through the parking lot, about to start the five-block journey to catch my subway at 23rd and 8th, when a black car stopped about 20 feet away from me. I didn’t realize it until the window rolled down, and I heard that unmistakable growl:

“HEY YOU! GET IN HERE!”

That voice, that timing, that delivery. It was whiskey on sandpaper, aimed at me.

As I slid in next to Elaine Stritch she said, “It’s too cold to walk to the subway.” She instructed her driver to take me back to my apartment, wherever that might be, after dropping her off at hers on the Upper East Side. And for the next 15 minutes regaled me with stories from her career, every word of which I transcribed into my journal as soon as I got back to my apartment on 103rd Street.

The one I remember most vividly is her acid recollection of a failed TV pilot in which she been cast as Mary Tyler Moore’s mother:

“Jesus Christ! Of course it failed! How could it not fail? Who’s gonna buy ME as Mary Tyler Moore’s mommy?! The fuck! They even shot a sequence of us riding a bicycle built for two in Central Park. Can you believe that, Bill?” (She’d remembered my name.) “Of course you can’t. Who could? Me and America’s Sweetheart. On a bicycle built for fucking two. Christ!”

We were never friends — I’m not sure she had friends — but I saw her several times over the years after that. A couple of backstage visits on Broadway (“A Delicate Balance” and “Showboat”) and a memorable dinner one night in the Village at which she fed me a gigantic shrimp from her overpriced shrimp cocktail. “Want one? Of course you do. You like shrimp. I can tell by the way you’re looking at it.” Then she dipped it in sauce, reached across the table and stuffed it in my mouth.

Nice isn’t a word you often hear associated with Elaine Stritch, but on that night in 1988 Elaine Stritch was nice. To her dresser. To her driver. To me. And I’m pretty sure to anyone else she encountered that day whom she sensed shared her frailty.

“HEY YOU! GET IN HERE!”

R.I.P.

* * * * *

var addthis_config = {“data_track_addressbar”:true};

Spilled Milk appears monthly. If you’d like to receive email notifications when a new column is published, go to the top of this post and click on the button labeled “EMAIL” across from the author’s name, and follow the directions.

And leave a comment if you like. William Lucas Walker responds to all except the most vile remarks.

More Spilled Milk:

Daddy & Me

Scouting for My Son’s America

Contracting Instagram

Why Julie Andrews Is Better Than Ritalin

When Dads Cheat

Where I’ll Be Spending the Government Shutdown

Dads and Bras

In Case of Inferno, Evacuate

I’m a Horrible, Awful Parent

5 Ways Gay Marriage Is Wrecking America (and Causing Global Warming)

What Would Dr. King Do?

It’s No Name-Calling Week… You Moron

Brokeback Bethlehem

The Komeuppance of Karma Karl

Strangers on a Train

If It Ever Came to That

Evolving Door

Tea and Coco

In My Room

Treehouse Envy

Homo’s Odyssey

Photoshopping My Neck

Crossing the Big Black Line

Prop 8 — The Color of Pee-Pee

Visit the Facebook page: “Spilled Milk” by William Lucas Walker

The multi-talented Broadway icon Elaine Stritch died Thursday at her Birmingham, Michigan, home at age 89.

Non-theatergoers will know her from her comic turn as Alec Baldwin’s imperious mother in 30 Rock. I remember her from a sweeter moment, after a performance of her Tony-winning one-woman show, Elaine Stritch At Liberty.

In that autobiographical tour de force, which ran at the Public Theater and then on Broadway early in the last decade, Stritch reprised “Civilization (Bongo, Bongo, Bongo),” the showstopper that marked her singing debut on the Great White Way in the 1947-48 revue Angel in the Wings.

Because my dad, Carl Sigman, had known Elaine (he wrote the words and music to Angel with Bob Hilliard, a brilliant but less-than-organized songsmith whom Carl referred to as “that glob of talent”), an usher took my mom and me on stage to meet the star. We waited in estimable company, right behind actress/socialite/philanthropist Dina Merrill, to pay our respects.

When our turn came, Mom placed the original Playbill of Angel in Stritch’s hands. When she asked “Oh, how’s Carl” and Mom said he’d passed away not long before, Elaine paused and teared up, seeming to search for the right words. She quickly reverted to form, giving us an unforgettable send-off when she held out her hand, air kissed us and said, “Call me, darlings. I’m at The Carlyle.” (Stritch famously lived at Manhattan’s stylish Carlyle Hotel for many years.) She didn’t really want us to call and we didn’t really want to; why mess with perfection?

In the brief clip above from At Liberty, “Stritchy,” as that ultimate sophisticate Noel Coward called her, describes how she convinced the producers of Angel in the Wings — who’d hired her for a bit part — to give her a song. That the song turned out to be the one that brought down the house night after night was quite a bonus.

“Civilization” went on to become a standard, with covers by Bing Crosby, Glenn Miller, Woody Herman, Jack Smith, and Ray McKinley. Louis Prima’s hilarious rendering went Top 10 and Danny Kaye and the Andrew Sisters’ call-and-response version reached the top spot on Your Hit Parade. But the inimitable Elaine Stritch was the only performer to bongo, bongo, bongo in two Broadway shows more than half a century apart.

Live animals. Hazardous waste. Used tires. Cash. These are all items that you can’t ship via FedEx. Medication is accepted, however, as it poses no risk to the carrier — or so it seemed. Today, FedEx was indicted in a US District Court, facing…

Your brain is a loose cannon, but you can tame it. At least, that’s the message from wearables startup InteraXon, pitching its Muse brain-sensing headband as the perfect way to coax your cortex into a healthier way of thinking. Another crowdfunding success story, the first Muse units are winging their way to backers, but I jumped the queue to try … Continue reading