Gift Btiskets Ssi-eet Tifivs On The Stage Soups Cookies Evet,,t-fatig i'Vlittle Fresh 1)ttily The Allergist's Wife' Playwright's outspoken aunts inspired Jewish shtick. , itt 0 INNS NAOMI PFEFFERMAN Special to the Jewish News Voted Best Challah Bread! IV Dakota Bread L I.eouPqn per or Expires; 11/30/02 count .„,441 or spft any the dicer not good with offer or 24-hour notice please on specialty items (sonic exceptions) 6879 Orchard Lake Rd. Ile Boardwalk Plaza 248-626-911() c. MORE THAN OMELETTES GEST OMELETTES Four Star Rating/Detroit News & Free Press **** Full Breakfast & Lunch Menu 1/2 OFF Purchase one entree and receive 50% off second entree of equal or greater value COUPON Not valid on Sunday, Holidays and Daily Specials • Children's Menu • Non Smoking 39560 Fourteen Mile Road (248) 926-0717 F, crusty Aunt Belle, who really did write that letter advising the Rev. Jackson to go "flick [himself] with a kosher salami." There's also a tad of Busch in the fictional Marjorie, the nice Jewish girl who's reinvented herself as a (German poet Rainer Maria) Rilke- spouting intellectual. "The self-invented person is a Bernhardt." Busch wasn't the first member of his family to re-imagine his persona. His Cincinnati-bred Aunt Lillian fled her Yiddish-speaking, Russian immigrant parents in 1932 to trans- form herself into an artsy New Yorker. Like the fictional Marjorie, she abandoned everything that reminded her of her less-than-glam- orous Jewish roots, which resulted in an odd religious upbringing for Busch. "We had a Christmas tree and for Chanukah, it was like, 'here's some candy," he recalls. In lieu of a bar mitz- vah, Lillian handed 13-year- old Charles the key to her apartment to symbolize that he had become a man. Busch, his breezy banter turning tearful, recalls Lillian as "a cross between Auntie Mame and The Miracle Worker. "In the early 1960s, my mother died and both my aunts' husbands died and my father remarried and • moved away. I got lost in a fantasy world of old movies and was flunking school until, Lillian stepped in and made sure nothing got in the way of my creative pur- suits." hen you're hailed as the next Neil Simon, what's a famous drag diva to do? Such was the dilemma that Charles Busch, the purveyor of Grand Dame Guignol, faced when he penned his clever Jewish comedy, The Tale of the Allergist's Wift, coming to the Fisher Theatre Nov. 5- 24. It's the saga of "cultcha"- obsessed Marjorie Taub (Valerie Harper), who's braving a midlife crisis exacerbated by her smug hubby, Ike (Mike Burstyn), her alarmingly candid mother, Frieda (Sondra James) and her enigmatic childhood pal, Lee (Jana Robbins). The director is Lynne Meadow. The Jewish shtick — including Frieda's hilari- ously outraged letter to the Rev. Jesse Jackson, signed "Hymie from Hymietown" — isn't what critics expected from the creator of movie-inspired camp- epics such as Psycho Beach Party and Theodora, She- Bitch of Byzantium. "People have been say- Matriarchal Memories ing, 'What a great By 1984, Busch was starring shockeroo that this little in his surprise hit Vampire drag queen suddenly wrote Lesbians of Sodom at an a Jewish comedy,'"' says the after-hours gay-punk club in amiable Busch, 47, sport- the East Village of New York ing a shaved head and Valerie Harper stars as the creatively frustrated housewife in the City. Thirteen years later, he black jeans while lounging midst of a midlife crisis. says he wrote and performed on a cream-colored chair a six-minute monologue in his. West Hollywood about a creatively frustrated hotel. housewife who was "like Medea, but theme in everything I've written," filtered through this New York says the author, who describes his Jewish persona." Greenwich Village apartment as "a Jewish Divas The character was so successful cross between Sarah Bernhardt's But the female leads are Jewish divas that Busch turned the monologue boudoir, a bordello and a 1960s — "big, flamboyant ladies with out- Allergist's Wife into a full-length play. steakhouse. sized emotions," he adds. As research, he perused Yiddish "After all," he says, "I'm a self-cre- They're based in part on his Aunt dictionaries and Cynthia Ozick nov- ated figure. I'm a middle-class Jewish Lillian, who raised him after his kid who's turned himself into Sarah `WIFE' on page 82 mother died when he was 7; and his . IN Classified Section M good zgopeto 10/25 2002 248.865.6308 80 seNseSseNilieNwe lS.