A View From a Broad by Bette Midler Page B

must take something, Harry. What do you think she takes?” Then I’d say, very dramatically, “I don’t take anything. I’m high on life.” I can hear it in the balcony now!—"Where can I get some?”
    It was a dumb little bit, and it was corny. But it was also true. Only once before in my career had I gone onstage stoned, and that was in St. Louis, almost three years before.
    On that unforgettable night, I snorted a bit of something the promoter, with only the best intentions, had left for me on my dressing table. It was hardly enough to do any normal person harm, and I felt I was entitled. That tour had been a killer, and I was exhausted. So I snorted it and went onstage.
    Four and a half hours later, I was still onstage. I sang every song I knew and quite a few I didn’t. But of course, I didn’t just sing. I expounded at length on such up and entertaining topics as How Do You Think the Soul Feels at the Moment of Violent Death? And the oh-so-cheerful, oh-so-amusing What to Do About the Highway Slush Fund.
    At one point during that sterling performance, I left the stage altogether, not to interact more closely with the audience, but to walk out to the candy counter in the lobby, where I bought and consumed an entire quart of buttered popcorn before being returned to my right and proper place.
    In every way, the show and I were disaster areas, and I punished myself for it for months afterwards.
    So I certainly should have known better in Amsterdam. But, as I said, I was a wreck, and everyone kept telling me how great the hash was and how they ate tons and tons of it and were feeling terrific and how it would relax me and I would be wonderful and funny and full of cosmic energy.
    Well, what I was, was nauseous beyond belief. But the nausea took a back seat to the waves of Nameless Terror that came flooding over me with tidal-wave force. I looked out towards the stagefrom my dressing room and saw a dark, cavernous abyss where soon I would be led only to be flailed and humiliated by those who had claimed to adore me not ten minutes before. My fears weren’t lessened. They were heightened. Not just heightened. Blown out of all proportion.

    “. . . I would be wonderful and funny and full of cosmic energy.”

I tried desperately to talk myself down. I tried to do my vocal runs, my exercises. I tried to remember my name. But I had truly gone to Gouda. And I was terrified.
    Miss Frank, of course, knew something was wrong the minute she walked in and saw me sitting inside the wardrobe case sucking my thumb. She offered me some tea, but not much sympathy. She had been with me in St. Louis and heard me swear never to work stoned again.
    “How do you feel?” she asked.
    “Sick,” I said.
    “How sick?” she wanted to know.
    “Very, very sick,” I said.
    “Good” was all she said, and then she quickly left the room.
    How heartless! I exclaimed to myself, my mind struggling to form even that self-pitying thought. I’m going to find that woman and tell her what I think of her! But I could barely put one foot in front of the other. And curtain time was only minutes away!
    When my girls came in for our usual preshow chat, they too saw what pathetic shape I was in. Each of them had some advice: a cold shower, a bowl of borscht, a hit of speed. But I knew I was too far gone for any of that. I didn’t know what to do. But, as always, Miss Frank did.
    I had no idea where she had gone after she left me so abruptly a few minutes earlier, but now she came back to the dressing room carrying a large book under her arm. As she got closer, I saw that the book was, in fact, my reference tome to all known medical diseases, which hadn’t been opened since I bought it. “Here, dear,” Miss Frank said, “I want you to see something.” “Really, Miss Frank,” I said, feeling dizzier by the minute, “I don’t want to look at that book now.” “Oh, yes, you do,” she answered back, shoving before my face a two-page