and then there's Maude.

Thirty or so years ago, Bea Arthur (of Golden Girls fame) was a legitimate actress on Broadway. This album is from her 2002 one woman show On Broadway: just between friends. Despite her legitimacy as both an actress and a stage singer, this album clearly still gets categorized as camp. It's camp status is confirmed on the first track where Bea Arthur spends nearly three minutes telling us her favorite recipe for leg of lamb, including how to make her special "mayonnaise-like mixture". For the record, Bea likes her lamp "slightly pink". She's also mad for Japanese eggplant, which she cuts horizontally, smears with olive oil, salt and pepper then puts under the broiler.

The rest of the album alternates between her singing various songs, mostly Broadway standards, and her telling stories from her Broadway and television career. This is the last show of an old actress getting ready to die.

Despite her deep, gruff voice, she's a remarkably good singer. It would have been fun to see her in her Broadway heyday. She sounds like what she is, a fun, old, woman with attitude. Sadly it also comes through that her career is, at this point, over and she's reminiscing about past success.

The stories are an absolute riot. She talks about when she started acting in the 40's and 50's and when she was more established in the 60's and 70's. The time spans involved are really brought out when she talks about being in the original production of Fiddler on the Roof with then child-actress Pia Zadora. In another story she describes Angela Landsbury as a "tall patrician beauty". This is shocking for those of us who grew up with Landsbury on Murder, She Wrote. Of course, by the time of Murder, She Wrote, Landsbury was already very old. Or when she says "I remember in 1956 when I had to join Equity...".

One of the funniest stories is of her dealing with network censors on the Golden Girls. Apparently in the first episode, Blanche introduces her date of the evening to Sophia. He complements Sophia saying how young she must be. When the man leaves, Sophia says "The man is a douchebag". This was censored. I've recently noticed that "douchebag" has become the insult d'jour. Golden Girls then, it seems, was a good 20 years ahead of its time.

However, my favorite story involves two men, a mother and a soup ladle. I'm going to make you go buy the album to hear the story. Other stories include, Tony Curtis fucking his first movie star, why "there's a little of the homosexual in all of us...", how furniture sales is like prostitution and why you shouldn't accept a blowjob from a nun. Yeah, it's a bit bawdy in places.

Between the musical theatre numbers, the Broadway stories and stories about gay men, every gay man should own this album.