Sally Struthers, probably most recognized for her roles in “All in the Family,” “Gilmore Girls” and “Still Standing,” is starring in “Hello, Dolly!” at the Alhambra Theatre & Dining.
The Emmy and Golden Globe awards winner, who turns 64 in July, lives in Los Angeles and has been touring in musical productions as well as appearing in movies, Broadway and on TV. She also lends her voice to cartoons and did promotions for a children’s fund.
“Hello, Dolly!” opened Feb. 29 and plays through April 8.
Struthers, 5-foot-1, plays matchmaking widow Dolly Levi. She met with the Daily Record recently at the Alhambra, accompanied by actor Michael Scott Ross, who plays Cornelius, an assistant shopkeeper.
Here are excerpts from the meeting with Struthers.
I was born and raised in Portland. The family that I have left still lives there, I’m there for all the major holidays, I have a daughter, (Samantha), she’s 32, I’m so proud of her. If you count preschool, she was in school for 28 years. She’s a clinical psychologist (in Los Angeles). She has a huge practice, her patients love her, I’m bursting my buttons I’m so proud. I have two dogs, Bob and Bananas, and they’re Scottish terriers. I love to paint and I don’t mean houses. I oil paint and I water color. I love novels, not biographies so much. I don’t like any form of beans, or beets, coconut or cilantro.
Where I’m from, Portland, Oregon, the same people that went to Minnesota, Michigan, went to Oregon and Washington, and they were Scandinavians, they were Swedes and Norwegians and Danes. They were used to the cold weather and they all just populated there. Paradise for me is Alaska or the North Pole. The colder, the better. I’m drinking ice water.
I’ve seen all of North America. I was sitting, very bored, on an airplane, years ago, and pulled out that map they have in the airline magazine, and started making an X in every state I’d been to, and I realized I’d been to 48 of the 50 states. No. 47. Not North Dakota, South Dakota, or Alaska.
My sister’s birthday and my birthday are a week apart, and my mom used to make us share a cake, and it would always have coconut in the frosting, and I wouldn’t eat the cake. I’d cry, Mom, why’d you put in coconut again? You know I don’t like coconut. Cilantro tastes like soap to me. And I read in a science magazine that there’s actually a gene that some of the population has that makes you find cilantro extremely distasteful. You have the gene or you don’t, and if you have it, it tastes like soap, and the reason I know it tastes like soap is when I was little, my mom would wash my mouth out with soap.
She washed my mouth with soap for standing on the porch and screaming to the neighborhood, ‘my mother wears a girdle!’ And she came out onto the porch and says, Sally Struthers! Don’t you ever say that again! She closed the front door and when she closed the front door, I did it louder, ‘my mother wears a girdle!’ She opened that front door, she grabbed me by the hand. She lathered up a wet washcloth with warm water and a bar of soap, and shoved it in my mouth until bubbles came out my nose. When I eat cilantro, ‘my mother wears a girdle’ comes right to my mind. I adored my mother. I don’t know what made me say it.
I had a very strange sense of humor. TVs back in the ’50s came in a big cabinet. There might be a top and a side and a lid that you opened with a record-player inside. It was a big piece of furniture. I would wait, as they say, for it to go on the fritz, because the TV repairman would come, and they would pull it out from the wall. They would take the TV screen and the innards and off he went in his truck with it. I was left with the hole. I would get behind it with puppets and products, and wait for my mother and sister to walk through, and I’d do shows for them and commercials.
My most famous commercial that I made up was for ‘Ap-Too Bosom Tights.’ I was fascinated with brassieres. I used to look through the Sears catalog, and think, oh my God, all these women have these growths on their chests and look at all that strappage and stuff that they’re wearing. So I made up my own bra, called ‘Ap-Too Bosom Tights.’ I was fascinated with girdles and bras, and I was like, why do people wear all these contraptions?
I was 7 or 8. I couldn’t wait to do a show back then. It’s like you can’t help it. It’s a compulsion. My mother was a very, very bright woman. She single-handedly got my father through medical school. She knew as much about medicine as he did. She prepared him for all his exams. Yet I would watch her in her later years be interviewed about me, and she would always speak incorrectly in terms of speaking the English language, because she was trying to make a point. They’d say, now what was Sally like as a child, and she would say, ‘Sally was born with funny.’
I couldn’t help it. My idea of the day was to get my mother to laugh, my sister to laugh, my neighbors to laugh, and at school to get my teachers and classmates to laugh. That was my joy. I didn’t care about the record-player, or what was on the radio, my music was laughter. That’s what I lived for. I still live for it.
I still think there’s a bogeyman under my bed. I will not be in the dark and let my hand or my foot hang over the edge of the bed. Because the minute that happens, I think something’s going to reach out from under the bed and grab it. I’m 64 years old and I’m afraid of the bogeyman.
It doesn’t surprise me that my daughter’s a clinical psychologist, because I can be at a gathering and I will notice the one person that I perceive to be miserable, or extremely shy, or not having a good time, and I will work my way over to them and I will talk to them the whole evening so that when they leave they will maybe have had a better time and loosened up. I can’t stand to see people in pain, psychological or physical, and I’m drawn to them and the clown in me wants to cheer them up and make them happy before they go to bed.
My sister tortured me my whole childhood, she was two years older, and finally I’d had it. We were in the bunk beds at the beach house, and she wanted me for the 4,000th time again to crawl over to her bed and rub and tickle her feet until she fell asleep. She made me do that every night. So she had to crawl over a space about that wide to get from her bunk bed to mine. We were on the top, and I said, come over here and I’ll rub your feet. I got really assertive, one time in my life. And she was halfway over, I knocked her hands out from under her, and she fell to the floor and broke her tailbone.
My mother made (my sister and her boyfriend) take me to the movies. They were going to the drive-in, and my sister was really mad that they had to take me. So about a block before, she said, Craig, stop the car. She turned to me in the back seat, and said, ‘you know, Sally, if you get in the trunk, we don’t have to pay for you to get in, and when we get inside, we have more money for popcorn and candy and stuff,’ and I said OK. I got in the trunk. They didn’t let me out.
We did a Lutheran church social. We went to the first house for appetizers, the second house for dinner, a third house for dessert. My sister had her driver’s license, so she was 16 or 17. I was 14 or 15. It was pouring rain. We carpooled. We had three or four other kids in my mom’s Ford Falcon station wagon. We came out from the first house and I heard her scream in the rain, ‘Hurry! Get in the car and lock the door! Lock Sally out!’ So they all hurried and got in the car, and I reached for the door handle, and she sped away, and I fell in the mud, and I had to limp back up the stairs to these people whose house it was and ask them to call my aunt and uncle to come get me. So no wonder I knocked her hands out from under her.
My mother and father sang all the time, had the record-player on, so I knew their music, and then she got Alzheimer’s, and it took nine years. She dwindled down to a person that didn’t know me, and in the last month she was alive, there was a man playing an accordion, and all these people were singing, and she was very quiet. She remembered words to songs from the ‘30s, and I was belting like I was on a show business audition, and she leaned over to me when the song ended, and she said, ‘you have a very nice voice.’ And I said, thank you. And she said, ‘your mother must love it when you sing for her.’ And I said yes, she does.
My sister and I were doing 12-hour shifts when she was in the hospital dying, and she died on my watch, and I was holding her, and she sang her way through to wherever she went next. She was singing as she died, and her eyes were closed, and she hadn’t spoken in two days, but she was singing ‘she’ll be coming ‘round the mountain when she comes.’
My first-grade report card from my teacher to my mother said ‘Sally is an excellent student, but please tell her that it is not her obligation to entertain the class, especially when I’m out of the room.’ I stood on my desk and sang and told jokes and tap-danced.
They say if you want to know your stripper name, you do your first family pet’s name that you remember as a child, and then the name of the street that you lived on. Mine’s Cobina Portland What’s yours? (Others in the room were Jake Van Dyke, Oliver Jenkins and Shep Rural Route 1.) That’s funny!
Archie Bunker would call me a bleeding heart liberal, but I truly believe that saying that there may be times when you can’t find help, but there’s never a time when you can’t give help. I truly believe that it is our duty as a functioning human being on this planet to be of help to someone or for something. If you’re retired, go to the area where all the tornadoes hit and help people clean up. Bring goods. Go to a hospital and read to a child whose parents work during the day. Donate your time to a library. Send a check for hungry children all over the world. Do something, because as Burgess Meredith said to me, ‘Sally, it’s just a tiny little planet hurtling through space, and we’re all on it together, and we’ve all got to take care of it, the planet, and each other, because the universe is huge.’
I take in kids that need a place to live. I don’t believe, if you have a roof over your head and extra rooms, that they should lie empty. There’s always someone that needs that bed. What it does for me, selfishly, is that it gives me people to say good morning and good night to, and to watch TV with, to make a meal with, and to laugh and cry with, and I just think it’s a better way to live. You never get any private time, but I have an eternity for that in the grave. While I’m alive, I want to be around people.
356-2466
Michael Scott Ross: Making mom happy
Michael Scott Ross performs as assistant shopkeeper Cornelius Hackl in “Hello, Dolly!” at the Alhambra Theatre & Dining. He joined show star Sally Struthers for a conversation. The 29-year-old professional performer is from Suffern, N.Y., and earned a bachelor’s degree in musical theater from Wagner College in New York.
I was in ‘Hello, Dolly!’ in seventh grade, and I got cast as Rudolph, who is the headwaiter at the restaurant in Act II, and I really wanted to be Cornelius, but my mother was like, ‘Cornelius, your role, you didn’t get it.’ Till this day, she’s still holding a grudge to our director in middle school. When I got Cornelius here, she’s so happy, she’s so excited, and she’s coming in two weeks.
Our art theater department in high school and middle school was just nothing. Now it’s the cool thing. I wish I had that when I was in school. I was tortured because I was the ‘theater kid.’ I was going to go to my high school reunion, but I was out of town and I missed it, and I really wanted to go and be like, what’s up?
Struthers: ‘What’s up? I live in New York now. And I’m in Actors’ Equity. And I’m a professional actor, and I’m working.’
I’m going to Las Vegas after we finish here to do a show. I’m there until October. I was singing on cruise ships for four years, so I’ve been pretty much everywhere. It was an amazing experience, and you just realize how big the world actually is.