I worshipped Ethel Merman and I worshipped Ethel Merman a lot. It’s incredible – Ethel Merman was a conventional singer. Her naming her child Ethel Merman, Jr., was, to me, one of the coolest feminist things.
BETH DITTOWhen I was a teenager I would lock myself in the bathroom for hours, bouffanting my hair like Patty Duke and trying to recreate Barbra Streisand’s flawless eyeliner, only to comb it all out and wash it all off before stepping out into the world a butchish bisexual teen.
More Beth Ditto Quotes
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Sometimes love can mean letting go and loving each other from a distance. Maybe that’s what you’re feeling?
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I’m a feminist, of course, and I feel as if I’m very politically correct, although I do question what’s PC and what’s not – I don’t just accept what I’m told.
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My size has helped make me an amazing performer too. The cliche of the Funny Fat Friend: I absolutely was that character – I am that character… It’s a complicated bag of tools I acquired, and I’ve put them all to work onstage.
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This archaic idea – that a woman who is unmarried and childless at 30 is somehow unnatural – will probably always exist, and, like most social standards, it is ridiculous.
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I grew up with the motto of “they can’t kill you and eat you,” and I still think that’s right. You sure as hell can’t! When it comes to speaking about my body makes other people uncomfortable but it doesn’t make me uncomfortable.
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I wish I could open a piece of my brain and you could see into my memories.
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For my group of friends is Lady Gaga eye-opening? No. She’s a less dangerous version of what was so cool about pop culture in the 80s. Back then it was so gay and so punk in so many ways.
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When I moved out of my mom’s house at 18 I was almost as sad to leave her sewing machine behind as anything else.
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I really worshipped Mama Cass a lot. Mama Cass, who was really fat and she didn’t lose weight. Yeah, she went on diets but for the most part of her life and the better part of her career she was a big person.
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I never said I wanted to be a singer for the rest of my life.
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I don’t love the word luxury because it feels Bougy to me.
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When I was a kid Ellen DeGeneres and Rosie O’Donnell were mere blips on the gaydar; and they were both still in the closet.
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With a stretch belt, anything can be a dress – a dinner napkin, a tablecloth, even a towel. Just wrap and snap, and away you go in an incredible outfit. Another plus is that the belt will pull all eyes to your lovely curves, and they even look good around a coat or a jacket.
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I think if the world were a fair and just place, there wouldn’t even need to be a gay label.
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You know how people love to glamorize poverty? There’s nothing glamorous about it. But it did make me really creative. Those days, I was literally taking t-shirts in the day and sewing them back together to make dresses for the night.
BETH DITTO