A View From a Broad Read Online Free PDF

“What the hell am I doing here?” “What was I thinking of?” And the inevitable: “I deserve this.”
    Needless to say, the longer I spent stuck inside that intractable hot dog, the more I became convinced that the whole thing had been a birdbrained idea to begin with. And once I questioned the hot dog, I began to question everything else I was planning to do in the show. Like my characters, for instance.
    I always like to take a few characters with me when I go out on the road. They let me do things I would never be brave enough —or, some might say, stupid enough—to do under my own name. The ladies I dream up are masks I can hide behind. And Ilike hiding. And I like masks. In fact, I love masks.
    Once, when I was about ten years old and as precocious as I was obnoxious, I sneaked into an out-of-the-way room in our local library that had always fascinated me. The room had no windows at all, and was dark and cool and as musty as an old dishrag. It was like no place else on the Island that I had ever seen, and I was always drawn to it, but for some reason, children were not allowed in.
    On this particular day, however, the old Hawaiian guard who usually hovered menacingly by the door was not at his post. In fact, I had just seen him sitting under the big banyan tree in the courtyard staring bemusedly up at the sky. Something about the glazed look in his eyes told me he wouldn’t be making an immediate return.
    So in I ran. I didn’t know what I wanted to do in the room exactly. Just be inside it, I suppose, because it was forbidden and because it was strange. But once in the room, my eye was caught by a book with a floridly designed cover that someone had left out on the reading table. It was called The Decay of Lying, and being, even then, a confirmed and joyous fibber, I wanted to see what the book had to say on the subject. I hated to think that lying, an art which I was only beginning to master, was on its way out.
    Of course, the book wasn’t about telling falsehoods at all. It was by Oscar Wilde and it was really about masks and how the only interesting thing about someone is the mask he wears—not the “real” person behind the mask. The persona was what mattered, not the person. According to Wilde, all that someone had to do to be devastatingly exciting was to make up a fabulous mask.
    What a revelation! And what a relief! To have a great personality I didn’t have to be a great person or even a passable one. All I needed was a great persona, and that I could invent. And what was most terrific of all, if someone didn’t like me or what I was doing, I could always peek out from behind my mask and say, “Just kidding!” Considering how shy and basically insecure I was, Wilde certainly seemed to have the answer.
    Even today, I love slipping into a new persona as much as I love slipping into a new Halston one-of-a-kind. It’s much cheaper, and far more dramatic. I call my masks my “yarps,” from an ancient Anglo-Saxon word meaning “woman who fishes for compliments.”
    Take Dolores. Or, as she is more formally known, Dolores De Lago, The Toast of Chicago, entertainer extraordinaire. I first dreamed up Dolores when I saw a picture of the Little Mermaid in my Danish phrase book. What a wonderful idea for a character, I thought. A mermaid! How innocent! How vulnerable! Of course, by the time I got finished filling in the details, the innocence and vulnerability had somehow fallen by the wayside. Now I’m afraid a character sketch of Dolores would have to go something like this:
    Dolores DeLago: her belief in herself is awesome.

The Magic Lady: optimism in the face of everything.

Dolores De Lago: A woman of tremendous ambition and absolutely no pride at all; a woman of tremendous determination and absolutely no skill; a woman of the grandest notions and not the simplest hint of taste. And all this wrapped up in a temperament Caligula might envy. Who else but a woman like that would dream up an act