On a Saturday Night in October, I took the B41 bus to Flatbush to hear Fran Lebowitz. As I milled around the Kings Theatre’s gilded lobby with the Fran-fans (hot 20-somethings, married lesbians, members of food co-ops), everybody—even the diehards—seemed curious as to what exactly the performance would entail.
It was a talk. Fran Lebowitz is a talker. She’s also a wit, a woman of (few) letters (her slender volumes Metropolitan Life and Social Studies were combined in 1994 into the still-slender Fran Lebowitz Reader), an inactive activist (Fran is an outspoken lesbian and political presence), a smoker (she’s smoked so long it’s cool again), an actor best known for playing herself, a Martin Scorsese muse (see: Pretend It’s a City and Public Speaking), an orator, a New Yorker, and a curmudgeon. She’s a cowboy boot-wearing, buttoned-up, fast-talking icon. To Fran, everything was better years ago, and even then, things weren’t so good.
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