The immensely quotable Fran Lebowitz is coming to Philadelphia to share her life experiences and sharp observations live on stage, Sept. 7 at Miller Theater.
The out author and social commentator started her career writing reviews for books and magazines before she caught the attention of iconic artist Andy Warhol, who hired her to be a columnist for “Interview,” his magazine. Soon she came to prominence publishing her own books collecting her comedic and sardonic essays, “Metropolitan Life” in 1978 and “Social Studies” in 1981. She was also a guest editor and columnist for Vanity Fair magazine.
If that was before your time, she gets it. Most of her younger fans are more aware of her because of her appearances on “The Tonight Show” or the HBO and Netflix documentaries about her (2010’s “Public Speaking” and 2021’s “Pretend It’s a City”) both directed by friend and colleague, iconic filmmaker Martin Scorsese.
Lebowitz says that while she is sometimes flummoxed by the generation gap she sometimes faces between herself and certain segments of her fanbase, she understands it.
“I’ve been doing that particular thing since I was 27,” she said. “I’m 73, so that’s a very long time. So, there have always been young people in my audience when I was young and when I was old. There are more of every kind of person in my audience now and it is probably true that there are more young people. Really young, I mean people in their twenties and sometimes teenagers. They tend to watch things more than they tend to read things. Netflix is all over the world. They certainly are different. I mean, they’re not just different from me. Generations change. Sometimes the world changes to a much greater extent. Certainly, the Internet had a kind of an earthquake-like effect on the world.
“One of the things that surprises me about people in their twenties is that, even though they have something that no other generation ever had, which is all of the information, the entire world in their pocket, they seem to know very little. The most common response if I say something and they say ‘I don’t know what it is’ or whatever and I explain it to them, what they will almost invariably say is ‘I wasn’t born then.’ What I would say to this is I wasn’t born during the Civil War, but I heard of it. I have learned to say things like ‘Elizabeth Taylor, she was a movie star.’ Because if you’re 22, you may not know that.”
Lebowitz added that there are things she admires about the younger generation.
“The other thing that’s really different about them is they’re incredibly organized,” she said. “These kids in their twenties are so much more organized than we were. Most people I knew when we were young, the same age as me, were disorganized. But they are, generally speaking, organized to the level that no one was practically when I was young.
“The other thing is that when they ask questions from the audience, people that age most invariably tell me how old they are. They say, ‘I’m 22.’ No one ever says, ‘42.’ So, a girl says to me ‘I’m 22. Could you recommend a good retirement plan to me?’ And I found this pretty stunning because first of all, honey, don’t you think if I had a good retirement plan that I would be standing here? No, I would be living in a villa in Tuscany. Twenty-two-year-olds think about health insurance. And I always say to them you have something better than health insurance. You have health.”
Retiring to Tuscany probably isn’t something Lebowitz will be doing anytime soon. New York and the point of view of living there is ingrained in her writings and observations. When the pandemic and the subsequent lockdown hit, a lot of people fled New York for greener pastures, but not Lebowitz.
“I kept reading about people moving out of New York who had a two-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn and three kids and then rented a house in the country,” she said. “To me, anyone who thinks that a backyard is a good substitute for New York City, we don’t need these people. The biggest division in people, as far as I can see, are people who like cities and people who don’t. One of the reasons they like cities is because they change. You know, a lot of people [say] ‘When do you go back to what it was before COVID?’ Never. I mean in any four-year period, New York would have changed immensely anyway. I like change, although you know, New Yorkers hate it when the thing changes their neighborhood. ‘What happened to my dry cleaner? Where did it go?’ Either people like to be in a place where there’s lots of different kinds of people or they don’t.”
Lebowitz added that suburbs and communities away from big cities are safer for LGBTQ individuals now than when she was younger so she can understand why some choose to live there instead of a big city.
“Lots of people my age came to New York just because of that,” she said. “You couldn’t live in a small town or a suburban place and be gay. When I was young, you’d have to pretend to be straight or be hated by every single person around you, or in some cases even worse. So now apparently you can be gay and live in a suburb of Minneapolis and live in a house next door to straight people. So, you know that that is progress if you want to live in the suburbs, which I don’t.”
Ensemble Arts Philly presents An Evening with Fran Lebowitz, 7:30 p.m. Sept. 7 at Miller Theater, 250 S. Broad St. For more information or to purchase tickets, visit www.ensembleartsphilly.org or call 215-893-1999.
