In my remembrance of Carol Channing, I mentioned how she played a cabaret-style show once at the Magic Castle and how my friend Shelly Goldstein went to see her. (Shelly, as we just noted, has her own cabaret-style show coming up.)
The day after we saw Carol there, I wrote this about it here…
The intimate audience was packed with stars, including Lily Tomlin, Florence Henderson and Donna Mills. Joanne Worley was there, too. Joanne Worley was Carol Channing's understudy for Hello, Dolly and the story is that when they met, Ms. Channing told Ms. Worley, "You're very lovely and you're very talented and you're never going on." (And she never did. Over the years, Carol Channing did over 5000 performances of that show and never missed a one of them.)
Last evening, a loving audience heard her sing her big songs, tell anecdotes from her life and even do some uncanny impressions. And not only did she sing to us, we sang to her. During her rendition of the title song from Hello, Dolly, Carol sang the part that Dolly sings to the waiters. Then, when she got to the part that the waiters sing to Dolly, she said, "I can't sing that because I'm Dolly…so you all sing it to me." And we did — quite well, I might add.
That was a great, fun moment and I just stumbled across about a minute of it on YouTube. Carol did two nights there and I have a feeling this is from the other night, the one Shelly and I weren't present for. But it went just like this…