To trot out the old cliche: "You can't go home again."
Ms. Stritch hasn't lived in Michigan in over seventy years. I can't imagine she would return, after a lifetime in New York, and expect the world in which she grew up. It also seems like she's maybe realizing that while she's Elaine Stritch, Legend in New York, in Michigan she's a retired old woman. Her comment about "nothing's comped in Birmingham" could be read as "no one cares who I am here."
"You travel alone because other people are only there to remind you how much that hook hurts that we all bit down on. Wait for that one day we can bite free and get back out there in space where we belong, sail back over water, over skies, into space, the hook finally out of our mouths and we wander back out there in space spawning to other planets never to return hurrah to earth and we'll look back and can't even see these lives here anymore. Only the taste of blood to remind us we ever existed. The earth is small. We're gone. We're dead. We're safe."
-John Guare, Landscape of the Body
Updated On: 6/13/13 at 10:43 AM