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 GraceAnne
Registered User
Registered:
5/20/2004
From:
New York, NY | posted: 9/18/2004 at 10:28:42 PM ET
Hiya, did anyone happen to save a copy of that great article from the Minnesota Orchestra Website? I think it was originally from another place, but it was posted on the site and now they have taken it down 
Did anyone happen to save it? If so could you post or email it?
Thanks  !
|  stacy122685
FAQ Maintainer
Registered:
7/1/2001
From:
MN | posted: 9/19/2004 at 11:23:17 AM ET
Later on today I will try to find it and scan it.
Take care,
Stacy
| GraceAnne
Registered User
Registered:
5/20/2004
From:
New York, NY | posted: 9/19/2004 at 12:10:52 PM ET
thanks stacy!
| Karen
Registered User
Registered:
5/3/2002 | posted: 9/19/2004 at 12:17:41 PM ET
The article was in the Winter 2000-2001 issue of Live Music: the magazine of the Minnesota Orchestra. It was written by Russell Scott Smith and entitled "She's All That."
Bernadette Peters didn't mean to be late. But on her way to the Cafe Luxembourg for an interview, she got distracted by a bouncy golden retriever puppy who was straining at his leash, eager to say hello. When she saw the dog, Peters cooed in delight--any fan knows the sound--and she knelt to scratch his ears. Before long she was chatting with the owner, and about fifteen minutes later, when she finally arrived at the cafe on New York City's Upper West Side, she was still bubbling with excitement. "Now I understand why some men are womanizers," she says. "When I see a dog, I just can't help myself. I fall in love every time. I fall in love every day."
That's how the rest of the world seems to feel about Peters, fifty-two, who is widely acknowledged as one of our era's most recognizable music-theater actresses. During her more than four decades in show business, Peters has appeared in fiftenn movies (including The Jerk and Pennies from Heaven) and eleven Broadway musicals, among them: Sondheim's Sunday in the Park with George and the acclaimed Into the Woods during the eighties and last year's revival of Irving Berlin's Annie Get Your Gun (for which she won her second Tony award).
But despite her success, Peters is no snob. In person, she's friendly and vivacious, and that charm has endeared Peters to many fellow celebrities in New York and Hollywood, notably Mary Tyler Moore, who has been Peters's best friend since they met on the set for the 1987 television movie The Last Best Year. The two acting legends bonded during rehearsals, and their friendship really took off one day in the ladies' room, when Moore told Peters that the only good thing about getting old was growing less hair on your legs.
"I thought, 'Wow, I like this woman!'" Peters recalls. "This is a great woman to connect with if she can reveal something like that."
Throughout the years, the two actresses also have bonded over their love of animals--particularly dogs--and their concern for pets in shelters. In 1998, they founded an organization called FIDO/NYC, which encourages New Yorkers to adopt from animal shelters. For the past two years, they've hosted an annual benefit performance, "Broadway Barks," where friends such as George Segal, Bebe Neuwirth, and Joel Grey show off adoptable dogs and sing songs from Broadway shows.
Peters and her husband, stockbroker Michael Wittenberg, own two dogs that they found in shelters. One is a pit bull, named Stella, whose previous owner had bound her in a collar so tight it slit her neck. ("Everyone thinks pit bulls are vicious," Peters says. "But I think it's the people who are vicious.") Their other pet is a mutt who looks like Tramp, from the Disney movie Lady and the Tramp, and who is named for the Seinfeld character Kramer. He had been in the shelter for a while when they found him: "People wouldn't adopt him because he's so hyper," Peters says. "He bounces off the walls and slides into the room with his hair sticking up."
This family of four lives in a two-bedroom apartment that opens onto a large rooftop terace overlooking the Hudson River. Peters has decorated the outdoor space with trees and vines that recall a Tuscan garden and continued the theme inside, where the walls are painted in subtle tones "meant to look like the outdoors of Italy," she says. As the afternoon sun moves through the room, the walls shimmer and change color. "But ever since my husband has moved his exercise equipment in there," she says, "the effect is completely blown."
Not that she's complaining. In Wittenberg, Peters has found the love of her life and the sort of romantic soul mate that seems befitting for a Broadway diva. The story of their courtship alone would make a wonderful musical. It would open with their first meeting, on a summer's night in 1993, with Peters standing outside her apartment building in formal wear, as she waits for a ride to a party. That night Wittenberg entered from stage left (actually from his home around the corner), wearing a tuxedo, on his way to a different party. "Are you ready to go?" he said.
Peters laughed at the joke, and they started talking. After a while, she noticed that a button was coming off his tux. "I'd fix it if I had a needle and thread," she said. "Well," Wittenberg replied, I'll get you one."
Amazingly, there was a tailor's shop across the street, and before you could say "truth is stranger than fiction," Wittenberg was back with supplies. As promised, Peters sewed the button on, and they went their separate ways. But that night, the button came off again ("or he pulled it off, whatever," Peters says), and Wittenberg slipped it into an envelope with a note and asked her doorman to give it to her.
In the musical about their romance, the couple wouldn't get together right away--there would have to be dramatic complications first, of course. And that's the way it happened in real life too. Peters was with another man when they met, so she didn't call Wittenberg, though she kept his card--and the button. During the next two years, they seemed to run into each other with almost spooky regularity. "I never run into people in the neighborhood," she says, and I always saw him." Wittenberg also sent a few more notes, and eventually, "as I was tying up my loose ends with this other fellow," Peters called him.
In June 1995, they went on their first date, to Soho. A little more than a year later, on July 20, 1996, they married beneath a ribbon-bedecked ash tree at Mary Tyler Moore's country house in upstate New York. "It was raining the night before," Peters recalls, "but the morning of the wedding, boom! It stopped raining. It was beautiful weather." That day, Wittenberg had all the buttons on his tux firmly attached, and Peters wore an off-white strapless dress, "like a tube with a little satin collar," that was custom-designed by Bob Mackie, who does all her dresses for performances. It was a non-denominational ceremony, featuring music by a Uilleann piper. A full Irish band played at the reception, which was held in a tent, and Moore and other friends spoke.
"Michael's mother said she never thought her son would find somebody suitable for him," Peters recalls, "I found that interesting and sort of scary."
There was no need to worry however; Peters and Wittenberg are doing fine. They even made it through the nearly two-year run of Annie Get Your Gun, when Peters was doing eight performances a week and had only one night at home each week. The experience was difficult both emotionally and physically for Peters. Each night she sang fourteen songs, many of them showstoppers, and for the first few months, she had to eat during intermission to keep up her energy, though she later switched to taking vitamins and ginseng.
Through the entire run, which ended in early September when Peters ceded her spot to Cheryl Ladd, Peters only took one vacation and missed two scheduled performances, both times because she was so sick she threw up. "I came on stage, said my first line, and was like, Ohhhh no!" Peters says of one of those sick nights. "I turned around and left, and they brought the curtain down." An understudy performed those two evenings, but every other time, Peters played through the pain--a skill she has learned from a lifetime in the theater.
Peters (who was born Bernadette Lazzara) grew up in Ozone Park, Queens, and starting acting professionally at the age of five, on the Horn and Hardart Children's Hour television show. At thirteen, she was one of the Hollywood Blondes in the road production of Gypsy. Every night during the tour, Peters would stand in the wings and listen to the blockbuster tune "Some People." "I was awestruck by the song," she recalls. "And I would think, one day I'm going to sing it." Now the song is one of the cornerstones of her concert performances.
And concert performances are what Peters has planned for next spring--a whole slew of them, including an appearance at the Minnesota Orchestra, which Peters says will feature plenty of her signature Sondheim renditions and probably a few tunes from Annie Get Your Gun. Rodgers and Hammerstein will likely crop up on the program too, she says. This fall Peters plans to record a variety of songs written by the masters of American musical theater. (The CD is due out next spring.)
"My career has been about learning and growing," Peters says. In many ways, it's just begun.
| Karen
Registered User
Registered:
5/3/2002 | posted: 9/19/2004 at 12:37:06 PM ET
Didn't mean to preempt anybody. I'm such an excruciatingly slow typer, that I was in the midst of transcribing when Stacy posted, and I missed it.
|  Rose
Registered User
Registered:
9/28/2003
From:
NY
Fav. BP Song: No One Is Alone and Some People
Fav. BP Show: Gypsy
Fav. BP Character: Rose/The Witch
Fav. BP CD: Gypsy
| posted: 9/19/2004 at 12:43:04 PM ET
What a cute story about the puppy!
"Oh no, you won't. No, not a chance. No arguements, shut up and dance."
| stacy122685
FAQ Maintainer
Registered:
7/1/2001
From:
MN | posted: 9/19/2004 at 4:19:26 PM ET
Oh goodness Karen! You're awesome!
I still scanned the article anyways earlier before I left for church. So I've uploaded it as a .pdf file (Adobe file) onto my Geocities account.
But how do I link it correctly so it will launch into a web browser?
I'm hoping to link you guys to it later this evening possibly. So sorry :-p
But I'm glad Karen typed it out for people to see what the article talks about!
Take care,
Stacy
| GraceAnne
Registered User
Registered:
5/20/2004
From:
New York, NY | posted: 9/19/2004 at 7:14:16 PM ET
karen thank you so much!!! you rock!!
| stacy122685
FAQ Maintainer
Registered:
7/1/2001
From:
MN | posted: 9/19/2004 at 8:36:37 PM ET
If anyone's still interested anyways in seeing the scanned version of the mag, pls. PM me. (I am unable to get a link up online so for the meantime I can email it to people or something). The text in the article is basically the same as what Karen typed up.
Take care,
Stacy
| Rose
Registered User
Registered:
9/28/2003
From:
NY
Fav. BP Song: No One Is Alone and Some People
Fav. BP Show: Gypsy
Fav. BP Character: Rose/The Witch
Fav. BP CD: Gypsy
| posted: 9/19/2004 at 9:50:05 PM ET
Are there any pics?
"Oh no, you won't. No, not a chance. No arguements, shut up and dance."
| stacy122685
FAQ Maintainer
Registered:
7/1/2001
From:
MN | posted: 9/19/2004 at 10:19:59 PM ET
Yes there are pics. However, you may find them familiar if you've seen pictures from different articles etc. One of the pictures is from the cover of her concert video. Another picture can be found on an old article from a Sondheim website.-if I recall correctly.
Take care,
Stacy
| Karen
Registered User
Registered:
5/3/2002 | posted: 9/19/2004 at 10:22:42 PM ET
Three Timothy White photos, all of them published elsewhere previously. Inside they have the one from the front of her London concert video and the one where she's sitting in a wire chair, which was a promo for her "I'll Be Your Baby Tonight" CD. There's a beautiful cover shot too, which I know is from something else, but I don't remember what.
| Karen
Registered User
Registered:
5/3/2002 | posted: 9/19/2004 at 10:24:26 PM ET
Another simultaneous post. So sorry!
| stacy122685
FAQ Maintainer
Registered:
7/1/2001
From:
MN | posted: 9/19/2004 at 10:26:22 PM ET
ahaha that's okay!
Take care,
Stacy
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