It was the perfect night for a concert - lovely, crisp, cool enough for a light jacket but warm enough for a picnic (including an order of parmesan garlic fries) near Ravinia's lush lawn. As opposed to Alpine Valley where we had to practically hose ourselves down with bug spray, there was not an insect to be found at Ravinia (the SuperSecret Mosquito Shield (TM) at work again!).
I had bought these tickets fairly late (as soon as I'd found out that I could buy them on their own and not as part of the trio series) and yet... we were in the 4th row, center section. Pretty much ideal seats. I felt bad though, because there were some people who had front row tickets and were, for some reason, surprised? by this? "Oh, no," they said, backing away. "This is too close." (WTF? How do you buy front row tickets and THEN realize they were too close? It gives you a seating chart online, even...) and so those gorgeous front row seats went unoccupied. I hope Betty didn't mind.
Anyway, whatever. Betty was fabulous! It was my first time seeing her and I loved it! She mixed it up with a lot of song styles - some of her signatures (1776, Sunset Boulevard, Meadowlark) and some other standards, jazz, stuff from her new album, stuff from her 1967 album... all delivered with some background to the song, some funny stories, and that voice. Wow.
Highlights - her greeting to us after "As if we never said goodbye" - she gave a big shout out to the people on the lawn (since we were in the Martin, they could not actually see her) and then refered to the Ravinia crowd as being "hip" but I think she was just being nice. "Hip replacement" more like.
"Meadowlark" - she said she auditioned for The Baker's Wife 9 times and didn't get cast. Then she said she sang it for a while and then "retired" the song. Mmmmhmmm, no more details there, wise move there as she was aware that she was worshipping in the house of Kauffman and there would be no jokes at the expense of certain other divas... She also imparted words of wisdom granted to her by her therapist after the loss of this role. "It cost me thousands of dollars," she said, but she was giving it to us as an added bonus: "GET OVER IT." (makes me wonder about The Baker's Wife, as I believe it landed Patti in some significant therapy sessions as well... If they could stand to be in the same room with each other, I bet they would have many interesting stories to share that would be better than any kind of therapy...
Moving on... "The Dysfunctional Family Medley" - "Children and Art" the witch's song from "Into the Woods" and the song from "Carrie"
Betty shared with us that she was in the new film "The Happening" and she said that M. Night Shyamalan "intended" it to be "a B movie" a tribute to movies in the style of "Invasion of the Body Snatchers." Really? Well, in that case, it did its job well. Nice way to CYA there, M. She urged everyone to see it and said something or other that it was the number one movie internationally. Bless her heart.
"Old friends" by Paul Simon that moved into "Unchained Melody" which she started a capella and totally blew me away. She could have sung the whole song that way, and it would have been awesome.
And, finally.... her encore was "Memory" from Cats. Let me just give some background here - Cats was the first show I ever saw. I loved it. It was my first cast album and I listened to it every day for a very very long time (yes, you may mock me now, it's fine, but in my own defense, I was like in junior high. My teachers though thought I was a total genius because I could 'recite' Eliot. Came in handy whenever we were studying poetry, let me tell you.). So to hear her sing it, live and in person, was unbelieveable.
Betty graciously thanked people from the stage, not only her band, but the production crew at Ravinia, her own sound and light people and her assistant. So I must take a cue from her and send thank you shout outs to my personal Diva Advisors, who have taught me everything I know: Sarah and Kari. You have not yet steered me wrong.
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