Riot With a Z

This from the archives of...2006 maybe??

I just got back from seeing LIZA MINELLI in concert in St. Pete. A friend had tickets and the person he was taking had to cancel, so I got to go at the last minute. Now I had no idea what to expect, with her being such frequent tabloid fodder, but I was hopeful.

Well, the audience appeared to be 85% people over 75 and 15% gay men with bad outfits. Actually the bad outfits weren't limited to just them, as there were many amazing and fun sights: the fuschia wild paisley jacket, the red feather boa, the blouse resembling venetian blinds, the "bedazzled" I LOVE YOU LIZA adhered to the back of a shirt....I could go on. In addition, there were so many wigs per square foot, that I imagined a small army of foam heads sitting at home...again...lonely, bald, cold in the night air, and wishing they, just once, could have some fun.

So we discovered we had good seats one seat from the end of the row. It is looking like a great place to leave jackets until this enormous woman (and I mean REALLY enormous) shows up in one of those mumu-type mexican dresses. Suddenly we spent the rest of the concert in the middle seat in Coach, but it was still fun.

Liza came out looking pretty good, sang three songs, then babbled something about don't we all love to meet new people, introduced a 14 year old boy crooner in a poorly fitting suit, and left the stage. The kid then proceeded to sing for about 20 minutes, and the politeness the audience initially showed started to disappear fast. Most of the audience had been trained in public behavior by watching Maury Povich on a daily basis, and having eaten dinner at 3:00, tempers were starting to fray. Before long there were several hecklers and people screaming 'GET OFF THE STAGE!" and "WE PAID TO SEE LIZA!" from the balconies. It was bad. Worse than if Denny's suddenly announced the Early Bird Special was being discontinued bad. I expected canes and wigs to start flying at any moment.

Fortunately, half an hour into the show, we had the INTERMISSION, so tempers were diffused. After the police escorted a few delinquent octogenarians from the audience (seriously) we were ready to get going again.

The next part of the show started with a palpably more skeptical audience then when the curtain first went up, however, Liza came back and now SHE WAS ON FIRE. It was great...REALLY great. She belted songs with amazing depth and volume, she sang an ode to Sara Lee in honor of her weight, she pulled off her fake eyelashes, wiped the makeup off her face with a towel and sunk her soul into the music. It was obvious she needed this performance and fed off of every second of it. She drew strength as it went on, took rest when she needed it with fantastic band features, and then came back in the ring, towel over her shoulders for more. There was humor, there was beauty, there was humility.

An hour and a half later, she closed with her two signature songs, "Cabaret" and "New York, New York." The audience, once ready to disembowl a pre-pubescent boy, was now thunderous in its appreciation. Liza appeared to be completely overwhelmed. Then something quite special happened: People remained standing and became silent. Liza talked about how much this meant to her, how being on stage is where she felt alive, where she had been born, how it didn't carry the barriers that so much of the rest of her life did, and then she began to sing again..acapella.."I'll be seeing you in all the old familiar places." Everyone was silent...there was a connection. We were helping someone who's life has held such a destructive combination of peaks and valleys, by simply allowing her to be.....her.

The song concluded and the audience erupted again.

An amazing moment. A great night. I'm glad I went.

A favorite quote, which seems appropriate: "How does one become a butterfly?’ she asked pensively. ‘You must want to fly so much that you are willing to give up being a caterpillar.’”

-Trina Paulus