Why Watching Bette Midler Is Awe Inspiring

To watch and/or to listen to Bette Midler is to be more than entertained. The experience of watching a Bette Midler performance or listening to a Bette Midler CD is eye-opening, awe-inspiring, and life-enhancing.

Is this hyperbole? I think not. Actually, Bette is a hyberbole. Consider her comedy, when she makes cracks as the inimitable Sophie Tucker, on The Depression Tour (1975-1976):

I will never forget it you know. I was in bed last night with my boyfriend Ernie and he said to me, "Soph, you got no tits and a tight box." I said to him, "Ernie. Get off my back!"

I will never forget it you know. It was on the occasion of Ernie's eightieth birthday. He rang me up and said, "Soph! Soph! I just married myself a twenty-year old girl. What do you think of that?" I said to him, "Ernie, when I am eighty I shall marry me a twenty-year old boy. And let me tell you something Ernie: twenty goes into eighty a helluva lot more than eighty goes into twenty!"

Or consider her musical performance in The Rose, in which she plays the brilliant and tragic Janis Joplin: Bette ramps up before a show to the point of amping up; by the time she is on stage scatting and shuddering, jumping and jamming, the movie audience is wet with sweat, shakes, goose bumps and tears.

Or think back to Stella, for which Bette plays the title role in a 1990 remake of Stella Dallas (starring Barbara Stanwyck, 1937), about a single mother who is crass, brash, crude, iconoclastic, and bombastic—who is an utter embarrassment to her daughter. But the sloppy and ostracized Stella (Bette) is heart-breakingly endearing, left alone in silent suffering, delighted by the smallest of attentions, and ever-twinkling in a way only Bette Midler can twinkle.

Or recall the comedienne’s near slapstick performances in Ruthless People, when her character, Barbara Stone, is kidnapped and her husband (Danny Devito) resists paying the ransom as he resists having his wife back; in Scenes from a Mall, as the over-the-top (but no less loveable) Deborah Fifer to Woody Allen’s Nick Fifer, the husband she fusses at and over; and in The First Wives’ Club, as the mouthy, rambunctious, and rightfully vindicated ex- who joins two equally jilted friends (Diane Keaton and Goldie Hawn) in clever ex-spouse vindication and revenge.

Or muse on the delightful, self-effacing charm of the Divine Miss M, who rides onstage in a wheelchair dressed in a flashy sequined mermaid’s costume, and pokes fun at everything from her leaving her ass behind to her jiggling her own shaggy underarm flesh when she gestures or waves.

To experience Bette Midler is to feel more than just hyphenated adjectives. It is to be transformed.