A Daly Affirmation

2/21/15

Today is Tyne Daly's birthday, and I have many thoughts I'd like to share about her, but it's 3AM, and my thoughts are all jumbled, so I'm going to go the bullet point route.

• I first became aware of her watching her as half of the police detective team Cagney & Lacey
  
• Like most red-blooded American teenagers at the time, Tyne often appeared in my dreams as I slept. That wasn't a thing? It was just me?
  
• I'm not proud of this, but I once threw my bedroom slipper at my mom (it missed) because she wouldn't stop talking during the climax of a particularly intense episode. I can hear her like it was yesterday, "It looks like Tyne lost some weight." To her credit, my mother did not tell my father, which was a big threat for me even at 19 or 20. And eventually we did laugh about it. Eventually.
  
• If you go to the Paly Center for Media in New York, you can find me on a tape there from 1994 asking Tyne why she wouldn't reboot Cagney & Lacey into a full time series and not just occasional TV movies.She said she didn't want another hour long weekly gig. I reminded her that her then current show Christy was an hour long. She laughed and said, "I already got an hour gig; I'm lookin' for a half hour gig!"
  
• As something of a show queen (I really don't like how reductive that term is, but it's apt) I have often heard and participated in heated discussions regarding who was the ultimate Mama Rose in Gypsy. I've seen six live productions, including three Broadway revivals; I've seen a movie version; I've seen a TV version;  I've  studied hours of Youtube videos of various productions and performers tackling the score, and for my money Tyne Daly was the most authentic, chilling, awesome Rose ever. It's been 25 years, and I can still see her in my mind's eye leaping off the stage in frustration and yearning during her climatic number, Rose's Turn. No, she doesn't have the singing chops of some of the other Roses like Patti and Bernadette. It simply doesn't matter; for me, she was thrilling and indelible.