Betsy Devine: Funny ha-ha and/or funny peculiar

“Do you know Leon Lederman*?” asked a tiny, pretty woman, impeccably made up and wearing a pink cowboy outfit. “Leon is one of my favorite people.” Naomi Judd is a country singer, songwriter, motivational speaker, mother of two famous daughters (singer Wynnona and actress Ashley) — and just all-around full of surprises. She also has her own website (Get a blog, Naomi!), and a lot of zingy one-liners in the book Amazon let me search so I know that I want to buy it. Amazon doesn’t seem to have the CD with “Big Bang Boogie”, which she wrote for Leon, and to which he danced with her onstage at a concert. If I had to make a bet, I would bet that Naomi Judd is one of Leon Lederman’s favorite people too.

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* Leon Lederman, Nobel 1988, is one of my favorite physicists too, and one of the best joketellers I’ve ever met. BTW, in physics circles, you meet some very good joketellers.

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Left to right, Stephen Sondheim, Edward Albee, Sally Field, Denzel Washington, and James Earl Jones answer questions from the audience. Some of my favorite short bits:

James Earl Jones: “Creating a performance requires going down inside yourself to find what is really there. Much of what you will need to find and use involves parts of yourself you wouldn’t normally want to display in public.”

Edward Albee: (In response to a student question on why people chose to spend their lives in theater) “I write plays because I am a playwright.”

Stephen Sondheim: “In theater, when you see your work, it’s constantly changing, alive. And that’s a delight, even when you’re embarassed by what they’re doing.”

Denzel Washington: “My advice to you is fail big. In some lines of work, that might not be a good thing. But I never understood people who want something to fall back on. If I’m going to fall, I want to fall forward!”

Sally Field: “My advice to all of you? Take an acting class, and take it seriously.”

Earlier in the day, Sally Field (one of this year’s award winners) gave a longer and quite nitty gritty short talk about the sequential career problems of a life spent in acting:

“I have been a professional actor for 41 years. I have survived in a profession where there is no tenure. [After a year of playing Gidget on TV] I was 19 years old and I did not want to play a flying nun. For three years of my life, everyone had a flying nun joke. The actress who played the Mother Superior took me to see Lee Strasberg, and I began taking acting lessons. I worked as a flying nun all day, and at night I was Sartre’s “respectful prostitute.”

How do I transition into being old? How do I survive in an industry that has no use for women of age?

Joseph Campbell said you must enter the forest where it is darkest, and where there is no path. As an actor you enter the forest where it is darkest again and again and again. Where there is no path, and especially not your own path.

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Just a few notes from a tiny subset of today’s speeches–Lech Walesa, Elie Wiesel, et al will have to wait until after I get some sleep. George Lucas: I’ve spent the last 30 years making one damn movie. I’m over 60 years old. If I could have gotten this done when I was 25 I’d be in a whole different place…. At the time I made the first Star Wars movie, Richard Nixon was talking about changing the Constitution so that he could have more than two terms as President–so that he could become President for life. I was interested in how governments switch over from democracy to tyranny, and I did a lot of research for the movie’s backstory. Basically, how it happens is that the democracy seems impotent or slow, so the government gets turned over to somebody who can get the job done. And that person usually turns out to be a tyrant. When I made Star Wars, I was making a movie for adolescents. Before I switched to film school, I was an anthropology major. I wanted to make a move that served the purpose that storytelling did for thousands of years–to tell young people what society expected of them. Fairy tales were invented to do what mythology used to do before that… How has our emotional intelligence changed over the past 3 or 4000 years? Or do the old stories still work? I think I’ve proved conclusively that they do work. (Cheers from audience) So my advice to mythmakers of the future would be to retell the old stories in a different form so that they apply to the generation coming up…. Yes, I do know who Anakin’s father is. No, I will not tell you who Anakin’s father is.

made a great funny short speech that ended with “I’m hungry”–the best kind of before-dinner speech–before getting his medal from four-minute miler Roger Bannister. Bill Clinton made an incredibly fascinating and incredibly long speech, but who would have expected him to do anything different?

I’m always thrilled when Frank gets a new award, but I’d never heard of the Golden Plate Achievement Awards. (Thank you, Mr. Google.) It seems the Golden Plate people like it that way–the press is not invited to their parties, but (in my capacity as Mr. Jennifer Lopez) this blogger is.

So here we are, in yet another hotel suite, this one the St. Regis in NYC, and as I head off for the gym I’m hoping that Katie Couric or Sally Field will be on the next treadmill over, because they’re here too for the next few days (among many others), doing symposia, meeting some fascinatingly brilliant grad students (200 I think), and getting their own Golden Plates.

More later, but one other big starstruck experience so far was dinnner last night in the Temple of Dendur at the Metropolitan Museum. I kept hoping to see Big Bird or Snufflupagus. Anybody else remember Don’t Eat the Pictures?

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More, from the press office of the President of Botswana…

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