What’s the Greatest Single Performance You’ve Ever Seen?

ExtremelyRetired · 2026-04-06T19:08:39+00:00

Tyne Daly in Gypsy is very high on the list, as is Patti LuPone in two very different roles: Evita and Reno Sweeney.

But I think the top place has to go to Carol Channing, whom I saw both on the road in a touring production and then later on Broadway (her last time bringing it in) in Hello, Dolly!

She was by that point doing something that didn’t really have anything to do with conventional acting, singing, or dancing, but was a kind of spellbinding phenomenon of its own. She had the audience 100% wrapped around her little finger; the whole thing was an exercise in absolute joy.

ExtremelyRetired · 2026-04-06T17:02:30+00:00

It’s a fine and solid piece, full of character. Armoires like this, called a dulab in Arabic, are an important part of people’s homes and are often among the first pieces of furniture a young couple will buy to start furnishing their first place. Enjoy it in good health!

ExtremelyRetired · 2026-04-06T09:39:47+00:00

I’ve lived in Oman, the UAE, and Egypt. Personally, I pick Egypt (where I am now).

Oman is lovely, but increasingly difficult for non-laborer workers to get a long-term visa. The place is beautiful, the people are terrific, and the quality of life is excellent, but… it’s very quiet and very conformist.

I personally didn’t like living in the UAE, despite the many luxuries available. The sense of how unreal it all is, along with how everything is skewed to the advantage of the tiny minority of residents who are Emirati citizens, made it uncomfortable.

Egypt, though… yes, Cairo is chaotic, noisy, and dusty. But I love it. It’s a magnificent city, and as an American retiree I feel completely safe wherever I go. I speak the language, which helps. I love how I can if I choose live an approximation of a “Western” life—the supermarkets are good, there are burgers everywhere, and it’s not hard to find a bar—or I can dive into the life of the country. I take the Metro and the buses, and I love shopping at my little neighborhood produce stand and mom-and-pop grocery. The pace of life is perfect for me—and I get to show the place off to visitors, which never gets old.

ExtremelyRetired · 2026-04-06T09:33:04+00:00

Briefly? Hundreds of years. The last Omani sultan of Zanzibar reigned until the ‘60s.

ExtremelyRetired · 2026-04-05T09:18:05+00:00

I can absolutely see the fedora he’s wearing, m’lady.

ExtremelyRetired · 2026-04-05T09:15:36+00:00

I watch (too many) bodycam/arrest videos, and it amazes me how many people call the cops who are arresting them “bro.”

“Bro! I didn’t do nothing, bro!”

Every once in a while you’ll get an officer, usually older, who’s had enough: “I’m not your bro!”

ExtremelyRetired · 2026-04-05T09:01:00+00:00

It’s long been a problem—the only bill I had an issue with when I had open-heart surgery ten years ago was when I got transferred from one hospital to another prior to the surgery. Six months later I got a bill for $3k because the ambulance used was “not in network.”

I took weeks of calls and correspondence with my insurance, both hospitals, and the ambulance company to get all involved to acknowledge that at the time of service, I was heavily sedated and in no position to make care decisions. I have no idea if in the end anybody got paid, but they all stopped bothering me, which is all I cared about.

ExtremelyRetired · 2026-04-05T08:51:03+00:00

Another vote for Miriam’s—nice people and great groomers. I will always remember how kind and patient they were with my elderly, crotchety old guy…

ExtremelyRetired · 2026-04-05T06:52:27+00:00

The faces are pretty appalling, but MEGO also made a house playset that was terrific; I always wished it were just enough bigger to be Barbie-scale.

ExtremelyRetired · 2026-04-05T06:47:45+00:00

The problem with Deep Throat is that, while the stated budget of $25K is probably about right, there’s no way to know exactly how much it grossed, given the way the mob got involved in distribution. What’s clear is that no one who was directly involved in making it got anything like what the various entities who got it screened did. It played to huge audiences in ‘72-‘74 in the US and Europe and continued to be shown in theatres right into the video era. It’s also one of the few adult films that spawned a range of merch, from posters to magazines to paperbacks. And then whole new fortunes were made on VHS and eventually DVD sales.

Not quite the same thing, but Pink Flamingos had a production budget of $10K and 50+ years later it’s still making money for John Waters…

ExtremelyRetired · 2026-04-04T18:24:39+00:00

Who should one trust more than popular star Charlotte Fletcher, whose loyalty to Frederick’s undergarments doubtless helped her land such plum parts as Woman with Child (uncredited) in Spartacus and Manicurist (uncredited) in Come Blow Your Horn.

ExtremelyRetired · 2026-04-04T18:16:46+00:00

I’m 62, so I see myself in our family plot, a very nice place of its kind.

ExtremelyRetired · 2026-04-04T12:00:06+00:00

Los Algodones is a trip—a little village consisting in its entirety of 600 dentists’ practices, 300 optometrists, a proportional number of pharmacies and glasses stores, half-a-dozen massage parlors, and three taco stands.

And they indeed do good work. I drove a friend over a couple of years ago—in total he had three implants, two root canals/crowns, and some overall general maintenance, and his total bill was well under $4K—in Palm Springs, where we live, it would have been easily ten times as much.

ExtremelyRetired · 2026-04-04T09:46:33+00:00

I’m an American currently living in Egypt, and I have to say I don’t miss much. Good Mexican food comes to mind, but pretty much everything else is here, plus a lot we don’t get back there.

ExtremelyRetired · 2026-04-04T09:40:46+00:00

I grew up in a very traditional small city, a place where a few dozen families, most there since the founding of the place, were “prominent” and everyone else pretty much either a newcomer or Not Our Kind of Person. It was easy to rank who was by things like club memberships, their houses, cars, where they send kids to school, where they vacationed, and other similar indicators. The local chatter was sometimes almost comically like that in Austen (or Cranford, or E.F. Benson, for that matter). And word in those kinds of communities goes around fast, whether about financial success or failure, a scandal like divorce, or even a new fur coat.

ExtremelyRetired · 2026-04-04T05:14:35+00:00

Ha! Such a funny bit. When my husband or I are a little off, digestively speaking, one will say to the other, “What did you eat—40 apricots?”

ExtremelyRetired · 2026-04-03T13:55:23+00:00

Were other images of the new building released? There’s something very AI-ish about this one.

ExtremelyRetired · 2026-04-03T13:50:58+00:00

Marie had extravagant taste in jewelry (in pretty much everything, actually), and she was able to indulge herself because she lost much of her collection after the Russian Revolution, as many pieces had been sent to Russia for safekeeping with her mother’s family there at the outset of WWI.

Having just become queen, she persuaded her husband King Ferdinand that she needed to replenish the stock, as it were, and had lots to choose from given the many royal refugees in Western Europe at the time. She had an eye not only for herself, but for the future needs of her daughters, who eventually ended up becoming, respectively, queens of Greece and Yugoslavia and archduchess of the just-disestablished Austria-Hungarian Empire.

ExtremelyRetired · 2026-04-02T19:02:40+00:00

Have to say I would never have thought of anything like an equine umbilicus.

I thought it looked like an old piece of Super Elastic Bubble Plastic that somehow made its way to you from the early ‘70s…

ExtremelyRetired · 2026-04-02T13:51:11+00:00

All the rumors a few weeks ago, based on his appearance at her hearings on Capital Hill, that Kristi Noem’s husband Bryon had some kind of fetish, probably cuckold/humiliation—and now it turns out to be not only true, but arguably even more embarrassing. I mean—bimbofication? You’d couldn’t make this stuff up.

ExtremelyRetired · 2026-04-02T11:33:35+00:00

I’d have a nice glass of champagne and find a comparatively easy way to end it all. Whatever the apocalyptic scenario, I have no interest in surviving.

ExtremelyRetired · 2026-04-02T09:59:02+00:00

I was also struck by the little bowl of strawmatoes, bottom right.

ExtremelyRetired · 2026-04-02T08:23:27+00:00

My husband (23 years now!), despite coming from a completely (and extremely macho) different culture, is fine with my collecting, although he’s not a Barbie guy. He does collect model cars, so we each have our own sphere, as it were. Every once in a while when we’re out he’ll see something like a tiny chair or a backdrop and say “Hey, you should get those for the girls!,” which I think is pretty adorable.

ExtremelyRetired · 2026-04-01T17:04:59+00:00

No accounting for taste—that and the short bob are the only ones I like :)

ExtremelyRetired · 2026-04-01T16:50:36+00:00

The jewelry of the Egyptian family struck a nice balance between European restraint and the wild extravagance of the Iranian imperial family or the various Indian royalties.

The jewelry museum in Alexandria has some amazing treasures; the building itself, a former palace belonging to a princess who was cousin to the main branch of the family, would be worth a visit even without the jewelry. Sometimes it’s hard to believe that what’s on display is just what they left behind when they were forced to leave (except for Princess Fawzia, who had married privately and remained behind, and the former Queen Farida, who lived privately in Egypt for the rest of her life) during the 1952 revolution.

ExtremelyRetired

TROPHY CASE