Dear David:
You've worked as an actor in New York and Hollywood, made a bundle selling real estate and written plays about global-warming scientists and a Texas mega-church. Now you work on one of the hottest shows on television, "CSI." So why the fascination with someone as retro as Ann Landers?
-- Curious
--
David RAMBO smiles. "First of all," he says, "she's very theatrical." By that he means Landers, a.k.a. Esther Pauline (Eppie) Friedman Lederer, knew how to leave an impression -- from her famously big hair to the snappy advice columns that made her one of the most influential women in America for more than 40 years.
Although Landers could sound like a neighborhood yenta, she also was a social and political dynamo, conservative on some issues and liberal on others. In this age of blogs and reality TV, it's hard to remember that she was ahead of her time when it came to talking frankly about topics such as alcoholism, sexuality and cancer. Her columns appealed to lovelorn teens and bored housewives, but also to businessmen, college students and at least one small-town Pennsylvania boy.
"She helped me get through my adolescence," says Rambo, who read her every morning in the Pottstown Mercury. The 53-year-old writer credits her with inspiring him later in life. "It may seem nutty to say, but I sold some houses because of her, and I made it through some embarrassing auditions because she always said, 'Deal with it and move on.' "
After Lederer died six years ago at age 83, Rambo was afraid her legacy might be forgotten. So he wrote a play that, like Ann Landers' columns, combined "a little sex, a little heart and a lot of humor." "The Lady With All the Answers," starring Mimi Kennedy, will open Friday at the Pasadena Playhouse.
"Lady" -- which premiered at the Old Globe in San Diego in 2005 -- is a one-person show unusual in that it is neither a revue nor a set of stories within stories. Instead, Rambo has created a running dialogue between Landers and her readers (or, in this case, the playgoers). "She was an artist who really needed her audience," he says as he sips a latte at a coffee bar near the playhouse. Without their questions, she had nothing to say.
On stage, Landers presides over her elegant Chicago apartment, ensconced with her typewriter and ubiquitous mailbags. When she isn't writing, or talking about her writing, her life or her twin sister (the rival columnist known as Dear Abby), she is cajoling and counseling the front rows, taking polls and doing whatever else she would do in print.
