How Does She Do That?

The trick, from a performer's perspective, is always how do you bring all those people out there -- who are, after all, staring at you right now, waiting to be entertained -- into your world? How do you make them understand the person in your story? How can your song, which you are singing at them, not with them, make them come to understand your struggle and adopt it as their own, even if it's only for a few minutes?

It's hard enough at twenty. Rita Moreno is eighty years old. She had achilles tendon surgery last year which postponed the opening of her new show "Life Without Makeup" until last night. Her voice isn't what it was and neither are her knees. She has obviously had most of the surgeries. She wears wigs. They show backdrop videos of her in her prime, dancing in West Side Story, playing third world vamps in films, singing songs from her five year stint on The Electric Company with Bill Cosby and Morgan Freeman and Irene Cara, or in 'Carnal Knowledge' with Jack Nicholson, and then she trots out to the front of the stage and dances Leonard Bernstein and Jerome Robbins's "Mambo" ballet from WSS. You see the older lady in front, and the younger lady on the screen in back, and you are bowled over by how GOOD she is! Not what she was. What she is.

How does she do that? The answer must be: she's from outer space, not Puerto Rico. This woman is from the Latino section of The Bionic Knee Planet.