Word: midler
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...huge screen on the Caesars Palace stage reveals a Nevada billboard bearing a poster of Bette Midler. She's posed in a cute blue dress with a short skirt that shows off her indestructibly fabulous gams; her smile is so electric it could light every casino on the Strip. A donkey wanders past, seemingly unimpressed, as, in the distance, a storm gathers strength. It morphs into a tornado, sending croupiers and chorines whizzing across the skyscape like Miss Gulch over Kansas. The door to an airborne Port-A-Potty swings open and an Elvis impersonator falls out. Now the video...
...Midler has come a long way since she was the gay guys' pin-up girl at the Continental Baths in Manhattan. She's 62 now, and her fans have matured with her. "Thirty years ago my audiences were on drugs," she confides. "Now they're on medication." Frequently she complains that she hasn't got the old energy. "Omigod I'm exhausted!" she apostrophizes after her very first number - adding, in re certain pop-star lip-synchers who've played the Strip, "That's what happens when you do your own songs...
...Bette's show follows the five-year run of Celine Dion's A New Day. That elephantine extravaganza, staged by ex-Cirque du Soleil director Franco Dragone, submerged the singer in gigantic sets and CGI effusions: rolling clouds, meteor showers, shooting stars. Midler jokes that she has come to "the only city that could teach Kraft about cheese" because of "the sh-tload of money they're payin' me." There's plenty of money lavished on the production too: $10 million (as she mentions three or four times during the evening), and it boasts some luscious videographic effects...
...that seems slightly desperate, it is. For years, the Video Music Awards were MTV's highest-rated programming event. Launched in 1984, with Dan Aykroyd and Bette Midler hosting, the ceremony was a remarkably fresh and satirical take on dull old awards shows. Because its premise was that the awards themselves were a joke - statuettes went to bands for videos in which they often didn't appear, let alone direct - celebrities were looser and more spontaneous, and so was the show...
...Game 73 and Hollywood Squares, Charles Nelson Reilly was acclaimed for more serious work too. He won a Tony in 1962 (in How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying) and a nomination for directing Julie Christie in a 1997 revival of The Gin Game, and he tutored Bette Midler, Peter Boyle and Lily Tomlin in acting. The openly gay sitcom regular (The Ghost & Mrs. Muir; Love, American Style) once joked that his near constant TV presence was his revenge on an NBC executive who told him that "they don't allow queers on television...