Save a lot of graves, do a lot of relatives favours

spatch just called to tell me one thing which he thought I would enjoy and one thing which he knew I would not.

The enjoyable thing is that Madonna seems to have come out; I just thought that had happened ages ago.

The unenjoyable thing is that Angela Lansbury has died. Like the Queen and the light of certain stars, she was expected to go on forever.

Because she was so superbly ubiquitous on stage and screen, it took me some time to place my earliest exposure to her. The likeliest candidate is The Court Jester (1955), after which the next best contender is a three-way toss-up between National Velvet (1944), Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971), and the original cast recording of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (1978). For better or worse, whether she appeared to me thereafter as Sibyl Vane, Eleanor Iselin, or Mrs. Potts, Mrs. Lovett left the strongest impression, a monster of cheerful and ingenious pragmatism with one terrible schoolgirlish spot for a man who hasn't existed for fifteen years—always had a fondness for you, I did, as tragically delusional in her own businesslike way as the man she daydreams will retire to the seaside from his Jacobean revenge. When she was younger, she had the linnet-voice of Johanna. I have been listening to her with Len Cariou, with Bea Arthur, with the audience of her imagination as Momma Rose. I have named a fraction of her history as a performer. She got to be a grande dame and a gay icon and even Madame Arcati, in the theater where her own mother had made her stage debut nearly a century before. I was glad of her in the world in her own form as well as the ones she acted. In her memory, I am still going to go eat a slice of meat pie.