For Fierstein, the mother of all roles

Fourth in a series of occasional articlesSEATTLE - Harvey Fierstein is shaving his eyebrows. This is a first for him. Oh sure, he's worn lipstick and eyeliner, dresses and falsies, high heels and pantyhose. But before he began playing Edna Turnblad, the frumpy Baltimore housewife in the new Broadway musical, Hairspray, Fierstein had never taken razor in hand and removed all traces of his eyebrows. Sign Up For Traffic Text Alerts "Don't forget the detail of shaving the eyebrows," he says over the buzz of the electric razor - as if it were possible to overlook such a distinctive bit of denuding.This prompts a question that even most veteran reporters never get a chance to ask: "When did you start shaving your eyebrows?""The day before dress rehearsal," the 48-year-old actor answers matter-of-factly. He is seated in front of the illuminated mirror in his dressing room at the 5th Avenue Theatre, where Hairspray played a pre-Broadway run earlier this summer.On Thursday, the eagerly anticipated musical based on John Waters' 1988 movie opens on Broadway, where it is currently in previews. But it was in this Seattle dressing room that Fierstein honed the look - created by makeup designer Randy Mercer, wig designer Paul Huntley and costume designer William Ivey Long - that New York audiences are now seeing.At 6:30 p.m., when Harvey Fierstein walks into this little room, he's an imposing, 6-foot-plus man with short, graying, curly hair and a voice that sounds remarkably like his electric razor, only Remy hair several octaves lower. Shortly after 8 p.m., when he walks on stage, he's Edna Turnblad - a (you should pardon the expression) queen-sized wife and mother with straggly auburn hair and the raspiest voice in the show.Watching Fierstein apply women's makeup is nothing new. Two decades ago, when Broadway audiences got their first glimpse of him, he was doing just that, on stage in Torch Song Trilogy, the play that won him Tony Awards in 1983 for best actor and best playwright.In part, Torch Song chronicled a time when Fierstein made a living playing drag queens with names like Virginia Hamm, Kitty Litter and Bertha Venation. But after making the movie of Torch Song in 1988, Fierstein decided he was through with drag."I said, I've done that for a large part of Weaving hair my career and I do not need to do that anymore," he explains as he dabs white makeup around his eyes and foundation on his face. "Drag is a mask that you wear when you don't want people to see who you are."Cross-dressing confidence But 32 years after he first donned a dress on stage (playing an asthmatic lesbian in Andy Warhol's Pork), Fierstein exudes self-confidence. This is the man whose charge to the 1992 graduating class at Bennington College was: "Accept no one's definition of your life, but define yourself." This is the man who recently published a children's book called The Sissy Duckling, whose title character proclaims at the end: "I am a BIG SISSY and PROUD of it!"And this is the man who is about to step back into a dress. "This role was too good to turn down," he says of Edna Turnblad, mother vHair weaving of Hairspray's heroine, Tracy, a rotund teen-ager who becomes a star on a 1960s Baltimore TV dance show modeled after The Buddy Deane Show.Hairspray is the first time Fierstein has acted in a Broadway musical. It's also his return to the Broadway stage after an absence of 15 years, during which he has had supporting roles in dozens of films, ranging from Mrs. Doubtfire to Independence Day."His career is a kind of icon," says Jack O'Brien, the musical's director.Although Edna is assuredly a female character, the role is anything but standard-issue drag, as Fierstein, O'Brien and Waters are quick to point out. Sure the part was created by Waters' late cross-dressing star, Divine. But when drag queens impersonate Divine, they're decked out in the spangly, evening-gowned look from Waters' 1972 cult classic, Pink Flamingos, not in the housecoat and slippers Edna Turnblad wears in the opening scene of Hairspray. (The character does, however, undergo a makeover in the course of the show.)In traditional drag, O'Brien explains, the performers always comment on the role. "At some point in the evening they go wink, wink, nudge, nudge, 'I'm a guy.' Harvey doesn't do that at all. At the end of the evening you not only think he's Edna, he's Tracy's mother," the director says."I contend that there are certain factions of our audiences who totally believe that he is Edna and I don't think that some of the older audiences stop to wonder whether he is in drag or not; they completely accept him for what he is, and more importantly, they accept that relationship of being mother-daughter."

lights turn off, the rich will stop dissing the rich - The Globe and Mail

It seems that Jay-Z, esteemed rapper and celebrity husband (estimated net worth, according to Forbes magazine: $450-million) is going to show his solidarity with the social-justice aims of the Occupy movement by selling T-shirts that proclaim “Occupy All Streets.” Really, all streets? Even the one where he and Beyoncé live, in their bungalow with a Toyota in the driveway?More related to this storyFew tears being shed for crumbling Occupy movementvideoVideo: Occupier heckles Michele BachmannvideoVideo: Occupiers begin march from NYC to DCAccording to a report in Business Insider, Jay-Z’s company, Rocawear, has “not made an official commitment to monetarily support the movement.” So he’ll sell the revolutionary message, but not fund the revolution.This has been a banner week for the über-rich to show their solidarity with Occupy by scuttling as quickly as possible away from the other über-rich. Celebrity chef and wearer of supremely ugly shoes Mario Batali created a firestorm when he suggested, at a panel to discuss who should be Time Magazine’s person of the year, that bankers were analogous in their actions to Hitler and Stalin. If those dictators – “evil guys,” as he put it – could be Time’s choices in years past, why not the new evil guys, this amorphous crew known as “bankers?”Oh, except those are the very people he’s been feeding for years at his New York restaurants, such as Babbo. There you can have the white truffle tasting menu for $144 but, if you’re feeling skint, the squab only costs $34. Although, the last time I checked, a squab was just a pigeon in a fancy coat.Now the bankers are biting the hand that used to feed them, and some are boycotting Batali’s restaurant. (He has since apologized for, and backtracked from, his comments, perhaps because he’s contemplating an chinese hair Everest of rotting truffles.)It gets better: Roseanne Barr, who once played a poor person on television, has been a vocal supporter of the Occupy movements, and has suggested the return of the guillotine for anyone whose worth is above $100-million, and for greedy bankers in general.I gather from the preceding that all these celebrities keep their money in holey socks under the bed, and none of them has any investments, or owns shares in any company, and they all pay precisely their fair share of taxes, which they calculate on an abacus while eating bowls of cold porridge.Now, I’m as opposed to income inequality as anyone. I support the Occupy movement’s aims, or at least what I think are its aims. I too believe the financial industry could use a good spanking, if I wasn’t worried it would enjoy that too much. But surely the answer does not lie with a comedienne advocating mass murder or a pasta pusher deciding that working for a bank is akin to full lace wigs committing genocide.You know you’re in trouble when it’s chic for the rich to diss the rich. I can’t decide if it’s more like Winston Smith in1984 (“Do it to Julia!”) or Danny the drug dealer, mourning the co-opting of radical ideals in the filmWithnail & I: “They’re selling hippie wigs in Woolworths, man.”Down at the Occupy London camp outside St. Paul’s Cathedral, you won’t find many people who can afford dinner at Babbo. You will find people who are there because they’ve got grievances about the way the express train we’ve been riding for a decade has come off the rails. I didn’t see any celebrities or champagne socialists, but I did meet Ashley Bignall, a 30-year-old from South London who’s upset about cuts to local services, including libraries. He set up the camp’s library, cheekily named Starbooks, where donated paperback thrillers are in rather higher demand than the selection of Malcolm Gladwell books. “David Cameron always talks about the Big Society,” he says, mentioning the British Prime Minister’s pet project for encouraging civic spirit. “But this is the real Big Society, all of us looking out for each other.” A set painter named Aaron admits his friends are laughing at him for camping out on the freezing cobblestones. “But it doesn’t matter,” he says with the conviction of a 20-year-old, “this is a global awakening.”Nearby is Seth Winter, 63, sitting with his dog Cochise. He lives on lace front wigs a disability pension that’s being cut. He came down to check out the camp shortly after it began on Oct. 15 and decided to stay. “This has grown into something bigger than we imagined,” he said. “It started as a march, now it’s an international movement.”After a bitter battle with the officials who run St. Paul’s, the protesters won their battle to stay until Christmas. This makes them more fortunate than some of the Canadian Occupy movements, which are in danger of being uprooted.At some point, the tents will be gone, although the issues will remain. The lights will shut off, the cameras will disappear and celebrities will find there’s a cozy hospitality suite where they’d rather be.