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Dear departed Shelley Winters knew a thing or two about the diva experience, and one of her most apt mediations on the topic may be found in her memoirThe Middle of My Century.

She was starring in the Broadway production of A Hatful of Rain, and during rehearsals she stumbled on the heavily raked stage, fracturing an ankle. As such, she had to open the show on crutches. After one performance, Ms. Winters continues:

I was resting in my dressing room when Joan Crawford came backstage. “Well, Shelley,” she haughtily informed me, “you were very powerful and had the entire audience weeping, but if I had a role with a drug-addict husband, was seven months pregnant, and had a broken leg, I could make the entire audience faint.”

La Cieca is not sure exactly how this all relates, but she vaguely intuits it has something to do with two opera-related pieces in today’s New York Times.

To put it briefly and bluntly, yeah, sure, in La traviata Renée Fleming may have “conveyed emotional ambiguity, the coquettish facade of a kept woman determined to convey pride and sexual allure, while her shame lurks just below the surface.”  But she didn’t do it in a wheelchair, did she?

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