Word: midlerisms
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POINTER SISTERS, MARTIN MULL. When Bette Midler scored with a remake of the Andrews Sisters' "Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy of Company B," I knew things were getting bad. When I first heard the Pointer Sisters, I could tell they were getting worse. Their harmonizing and shimmying is okay. But the music is insufferable, all the more so because you're supposed to take it seriously...
These sweaters, T shirts, tank tops and long-sleeved shirts do everything but give off sparks. They are festooned with rhinestones, sequins, silver threads, gold sparkle dust and paint. There are abstract designs in the Art Deco vein. Another line stresses the representational (Bette Midler's face in sequins, flowers and animals in sparkle dust). A "words and numbers" series allows the wearer to advertise her home town ("Palm Springs: P.S. I love you") or favorite athlete's numeral. For the most part, the tops are priced for the jeans wearer's budget (usually between...
...formula for a performance by a pop singer, it sounds - well, dubious. The kind of thing that might catch on, say, with a minor cult surrounding some blatantly hip homosexual nightclub. Which is exactly what happened to Singer Bette Midler 2½ years ago, when she billed herself as "the divine Miss M" and began doing such an act at Manhattan's Continental Baths, a gaily liberated Turkish bath that imports outside entertainment on weekends. But since then, Midler has left the Continental Baths far behind, and her brand of "trash with flash," as she identifies it, has made...
...Edwardsville, the orange-frizzed, troll-sized (5 ft. 1 in.) Midler hit the stage like a cartoon of a cyclone. "She's here," she assured her audience. "The divine Miss M is here." Actually, she was here, there and all over the stage at once - leaping, squatting, strutting, eyes popping, cakewalking at treble speed, as if she were strobe-lit from the inside. Midler has, as the French say, a world on her balcony, and it threatened to topple right out of her purple satin slip as she flounced across the stage to snipe...
...Midler has been compared to everything from Dorothy Parker in drag to the entire chorus line of beruffled hippos in Fantasia, and she shows traces of a dozen other singers: Streisand's nose and extraordinary head tones, Garland's saturation emotions and devoted homosexual following, Fanny Brice's waifish vulnerability, Joplin's floozy eleganza in attire and her tendency to egg audiences on to hysteria. But Miss M's secret is that she is not really like those others: she is acting like them. "I just try to have a good time...