Monday, July 20, 2020

Headphones Dispatch once upon a time there was a woman who served as the frontline warrior it was m

July 20, 2020 Headphones Dispatch once upon a time there was a woman who served as the frontline warrior it was m

For the liner notes to Headphones Dispatch once upon a time there was a woman who served as the frontline warrior it was m . the peerless comedy duo Nichols and May’s 1959 album Improvisations to Music, Elaine May famously provided the following terse bio: “Miss May does not exist.” At the time, May and her partner, Mike Nichols, were beginning their meteoric rise as the smartest, most literate, and funniest—not to mention most famous—comedy duo of their era, performing hyperarticulate, mordantly hilarious sketches with an undertow of melancholy that appealed to both New York sophisticates (catching them at such nightclubs as the Blue Angel and later on Broadway) and the wider audience watching on TV. Despite her fame (and current status as a legend/icon), May’s early self-penned bio is an apt one: As a performer, writer, and director, she has created an indelible body of work while largely staying, as a person, out of the public eye—here but not here.