Austin360 blogs > Out & About > Archives > 2007 > December > 05 > Entry
Dame Edna mocks my tattoo
Just rung off with Dame Edna Everage. Yes, that Dame Edna, aka Barry Humphries. She’s in Switzerland, “visiting my money in a vault in Zurich,” she said. “I left it blinking like a possum or a mole.”
The first lady of Australian comedy is prepping for another American tour, this time with a Jan. 18-20 stop at the Paramount Theatre, a vaudeville house not unlike the ones where she’s performed on Broadway. “Some people say I’m a vaudeville person,” she said. “I see myself more as a therapist, a healer of the pain and hurt in America today.”
Frankly, she had me giggling and gasping for air during the entire conversation, which was more of a sustained monologue on her part. The Dame teased me about my recent tattoo: “What does Kip think about it?” I assured her that Kip had a matching one, which tickled her. (The performer’s team researches interviewers in advance.)
I reminded her that she once heckled me in a Broadway theater: “Left your same-sex partner behind, did we?” Now how did Edna know that? No amount of research…
She insists that, after 50 years on stage, she doesn’t need the profits from another tour: “I am not coming to Austin to rape the pocketbooks of the Austinians.” When not at the Paramount or her hotel, she says: “I’ll be in the malls and the shops and on campus and on that bridge watching the bats.”
I didn’t have the heart to tell her that the Ann Richards Congress Avenue Bridge Mexican free-tailed bat colony will be vacationing in Mexico when she arrives.
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