Toot, toot, Tootie goodbye

I'm a few days behind in posting this, but Eric and I had the pleasure of catching Charlotte Rae's appearance at the Lincoln Center Barnes & Noble on Wednesday. She was there to promote her recently reissued album "Songs I Taught My Mother."

What a delight it was! At 80, she's just as adept at mugging and broad comedy as ever. She had the room eating from her tiny hand during the approximate hour-long set -- most of the songs in which I didn't know, but no matter. Who else could sell songs about lovelorn gophers and merry minuets to sing amid the strife in the daily news? Sheldon Harnick, the author of the latter, also was in attendance. And it was truly a joy to hear her perform "The Ballad of Dependency" from "The Threepenny Opera," a song she performed as Mrs. Peachum in 1954. A side note: Her version of "Pirate Jenny," which is available through iTunes, is one of the most wonderfully vicious versions of that song I've ever heard.

Eric and I also had a lot of fun failing miserably at star-spotting in the audience. We were able to pick out Olympia Dukakis, but the rest were people who we knew we should have known but didn't. For a second, I was sure that I had spotted Pamela Myers until it was pointed out to me that she was involved in another project and not nearly old enough to have been the woman I was looking at.

At any rate, it's a little sad that most people will remember her as nothing more than Mrs. Garrett from "The Facts of Life" -- or even worse, for Paul Vogt's impersonation of her as Mrs. Garrett on MadTV. She was nominated for a Tony twice, after all. And more recently, she called Joan Collins a bitch.