And that someone as visibly, pronouncedly Jewish should forever share her moment with Hepburn, celluloid’ s ultimate WASP exemplar, makes that announcement even more of a milestone. So who should know better to chronicle Streisand in Hello, Gorgeous: Becoming Barbra Streisand than author William J. Mann, who has previously penned the insightful biography Kate: The Woman Who Was Hepburn?

While the title cribs from Streisand’s signature, first line in Funny Girl, the movie that nabbed her her first Oscar, Mann never gets to that point. Instead, he focuses on a smaller window of her life, from 1960 to 1964, as the ambitious performer first made it out of the Brooklyn house dominated by her tough mother, Diana Kind, and began her launch into the stratosphere. He homes in on the gray areas usually bypassed in James Lipton’s useless Inside the Actor’s Studio filmographies. And so Gorgeous becomes a simultaneous dissection of a woman, a star, a talent and an industry all at once.

Meticulously researched and told with a cunning sense of acuity, Gorgeous provides enough personal details to whet the appetite without veering into overly salacious territory. Mann recounts Streisand’s family background – the father she lost before her second birthday, her mother’s remarriage and the rancorous relationship between the two women. He provides new accounts of her early sexual fumblings and the start of her relationship with first husband Elliott Gould, his subsequent drug use and her eventual straying. And if he gives short shrift to her early recording successes and Emmy and Grammy wins, his detailed account of ascent to Broadway stardom in I Can Get It For You Wholesale and then attachment to the Fanny Brice story in Girl remain a testament to a day when stardom still required both pluck and talent.

Most important of all, however, was how Streisand wore her ethnicity on her sleeve. Her refusal to alter her nose or name and her penchant for over-enunciating were both a shtick and a calling card. Mann dwells on how she forced people to look at her as is, which was a gamble, equal parts brave and stupid. While other Jewish actresses had become familiar to audiences (including Judy Holliday), most were relegated to character actress status. Streisand would blast past all of them. Through a series of interviews with such subjects as Kaye Ballard and Lainie Kazan, Mann carves a very human portrait.  He details the nerves and insecurities that came her way as a performer, even as the encomiums did as well. He acknowledges that she was never known to say “thank you,” but also highlights the rare instances when she did.

Gorgeous was not authorized by its subject, but nor was Mann’s access to information blocked in any way. It differs from other treatises on the woman who would sing “I’m the Greatest Star” in that instead of charting the course of her life and career – divorce, diva reputation, refusal to perform live – it focuses on the mechanics of the roller coaster that would lead to all the ups and downs. And this tome, at more than 500 pages, is quite the well-oiled machine. It’s a must for those who know nothing about La Streisand as well as for those who think they already know it all.

For more information about Hello, Gorgeous, go to williamjmann.com.

A new queen has been crowned. After two rounds of semifinals and a final round on the evening of Nov. 13, the judges of Our Town’s Karaoke Idol event picked a winner.

All three events took place at the dinner clubs Lips. As the clock approached contest start time at 9:30, the crowd grew and the judges convened: Lee Evans, an award-winning producer; Carol Henning, a performer from Tandava Arts; and Paula Liscio, an opera singer and vocal coach.
Nicole Ortiz launched the competition with a soulful rendition of “I’m Every Woman,” but it was her second number, “I Will Always Love You,” that gave goosebumps to everyone and earned her a standing ovation.

Host Blackie O put it well, saying, “I feel as though Whitney Houston rose from the grave, put clothes on and performed for us tonight.”

Claudio Lake looked stunning and festive in his finale outfit, complete with matching blue hair and pants, but the judges felt that his song choices weren’t the best.

Our BBBBBD (Big Beautiful Black Broadway Bound Diva) Natalie Randall thrilled the house with her first number, “I Love You I Do,” but her second performance was marred by a technical glitch that prevented her from seeing the lyrics. She was comforted by the judges’ comments that she handled the mishap like a pro.

Thinking out of the pop-and-rock box, Maggie De Silva sang Barbra Streisand’s “Don’t Rain on My Parade” and a country ballad from Faith Hill, “Like We Never Loved at All.” When complimented by the judges on how glamorous she looked, Maggie replied she was trying to keep up with Blackie O. Later, Blackie O pointed out to her that it was no competition because what we were seeing in her own case was a result of tons of make-up and having to shave all over. To which Maggie (an RG, or real girl, in drag-queen parlance) wittily replied, “I do the same thing, too.” That brought raucous laughter from the audience.

Despite the dramatic ending to his second song “So Amazing” by Luther Vandross, the judges lamented that the Mike Vocalz that wowed them in the first preliminary just wasn’t there that night.
Lauren Abrami brought sexy to the contest with her almost X-rated performance of “Bad Romance,” with the mic stand sometimes doubling as a stripper pole. It was her rendition of Pink’s “Nobody Knows” that was most impressive, as she tackled the wide octave range of the song with ease.

The judges took a long time to deliberate, explaining that “blood is at stake.” Ultimately, Nicole Ortiz won the title of Karaoke Idol and $1,000. A very close second was runner-up Lauren Abrami, who won $500. Both get recording studio time as well.

With the winners & the other finalists still onstage, flanked by all of the Lips performers, Blackie O concluded Karaoke Idol 2012. So much fun, excitement and enjoyment was had by everyone, nobody was ready to leave.

It’s that line, delivered by Marie (Carrie Fisher) to Jess (Bruno Kirby), after learning that their mutual best friends Harry and Sally (yes, Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan) have switched up their friendship from platonic to “it’s complicated,” that makes Nora Ephron’s screenplay for When Harry Met Sally a work for the ages. (Yes, even more than that orgasm scene in Katz’s.) How a movie could be so light, so funny, so modern, could also manage to be so deftly universal and heart-piercing is the grand achievement of Ephron’s quite checkered career.

Very sadly, this career came to an end last night as Ephron lost a private battle with acute myeloid leukemia. But over the course of four decades, Ephron, an Upper West Side Jew raised in Hollywood by a team of play- and screenwriting parents, married the lightning-quick wit of Joan Rivers and the career ambition of Barbra Streisand in order to give birth to one of the most impressive – and sure to be emulated – lives a storyteller has ever enjoyed.

Harry garnered Ephron a solo Oscar nomination, though she already had shared a nod with Alice Arlen for adapting Silkwood (her first outing with Meryl Streep) and would later share another nomination with Jeff Arch and David S. Ward for Sleepless in Seattle, her second at-bat as director and first monster hit. Though she came from a prominent background that opened many doors to her, Ephron’s career history demonstrates an eager and talented employee who made sure to fill whatever room she was in, first as a mail at Newsweek and later as a writer for the New York Post, Esquire and New York (a magazine that would continue to extol and interview her as recently as this past year).

Her attention to detail and human folly characterized her work, and it’s those nuances permeating her work in all genres, both non-fiction and fictional, that elevated her humorous observations to something more prescient and evergreen. Working on an ultimately dismissed version of a script for All the President’s Men with then-husband, Watergate journalist Carl Bernstein, helped open even more doors for the writer in Hollywood in the mid-1970s. (It was the second marriage for Ephron; a third, to GoodFellas co-writer Nicholas Pileggi lasted until her death.)

Ephron was also, famously, willing to divulge her own personal hurts and humiliations, as she did in Heartburn, loosely translating her marriage to, betrayal by, and divorce from Bernstein. (The two had two sons together, Jacob and Max.) Streep and Jack Nicholson played the Ephron and Bernstein surrogates.

The most celebrated directors and actors clamored to work with Ephron over the years – Tom Hanks, Diane Keaton, Nicole Kidman, Mike Nichols, John Travolta. 2009’s Julie & Julia also helped turn the page in Streep’s own career, providing the opportunity to plum deep in a comedic but respectful look at chef Julia Child. Though her directorial debut, This Is My Life, showed some of the under-nourished signs of a fledgling director, it signaled one of Ephron’s signature storytelling motifs that would continue through other films like Mixed Nuts, You’ve Got Mail, Bewitched: strong women.

The dominant theme of the movies in which Ephron had a voice is that they feature women on equal emotional, professional, and romantic footing with their male counterparts. In Life, Dottie (Julie Kavner), is a single mother and struggling stand-up comic who suddenly finds success. Annie, the Ryan character in Sleepless, is a Baltimore journalist; Kathleen, the Ryan role in Mail, runs a family bookstore on the Upper West Side. She believes in the joy of reading and opposes the corporate monoliths out to destroy the charms of smaller stores. Though many (not all, however) of her female leads ended up with the guy, they remain defined by their own interests and experiences. The man need not complete her; he merely complements her.

Ephron had, typically, showed few signs of slowing down. A Broadway production of Lucky Guy, a new play late columnist Mike McAlary, is targeted for a Broadway opening in early 2013 and would mark Hanks’ Main Stem debut. But her crowning achievement will always be, for me, Harry, a film I have seen over two hundred times since it opened nearly 23 years ago. For all the classics like Casablanca and Gone With the Wind, and record-breaking moneymakers like Avatar and The Avengers, Harry is, by leaps and bounds, the single movie mentioned more than any other as a personal favorite in my conversations with people about movies they love. Why? Because of how Ephron tapped into its cross-generational appeal. She knew that a movie about love, insecurity, good food and real estate could reach just about anyone.

Ephron’s career and legacy are impressive enough to make even the most fulfilled and self-assured recite that other, oft-quoted line from Harry: “I’ll have what she’s having.”