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Maggie Smith: "Tea with Dames"

The writer Victor LaValle had an observation. "If the toughest character in your story is not an old lady who no longer gives a shit? Then I don't believe your story. Old ladies are the definition of badass."

He was referring to that aura you get when you're no longer interested in impressing people. When excessive tact is no longer your calling card.

I fondly remember an older teacher I was shadowing at the start of my career. I asked if I could observe a lesson and she wrote, bluntly, "No. Not today. I don't feel well." I'm certain that many, many other people would have just ushered me in, for fear of seeming rude--or at least would have written a lengthy, winding apology. I really admired that blunt dismissal.

In "Tea with Dames," the lady past the point of Needy Caring is, of course, Maggie Smith. There's an Amy Bloom story where a character says, in an admiring way, "My friend has a lot of chien." I think that refers to a kind of icy chic-ness (correct me if I'm wrong). And I think Dame Maggie has a good deal of chien.

"Why is that man taking so many photos?" says Maggie, at one point. "Go away, young man." It's clear the man is just doing his job, but he is effectively shut down. Half-bored, Maggie manufactures a story: "I'm doing him a favor. See? Look at him. He didn't want to be doing that anymore."

Maggie chuckles when Joan Plowright tells a story: "My agent would always say, we'll get you some cameo in an American film, if Judi Dench doesn't get her paws on it first." Offended, Judi throws a little fit. And it's Maggie who informs Judi, in just a few words, that she is being ridiculous. "It's a funny story. That's how they speak in America. Joan is telling the truth."

Feeling mischievous, Dame Maggie lets rip with something I've heard before, in other contexts: "I've never actually watched Downton Abbey. So many, many hours. If I started watching now, it would still be running when I'm dead." And: "I just remember the hats. Monstrous hats. One was as large as the Royal Albert Hall, and I'd ask, can we please, please remove this?"

The other dames are merely planets orbiting Ms. Smith's bright sun. (And one wonders: Where is Helen Mirren? Where is Vanessa Redgrave?) Even if you're not Maggie Smith, however, you might still have some worthwhile things to say. Eileen Atkins recalls a casting director murmuring to another director: "She is not pretty, you're right. But she is sexy." (Atkins says that this overheard sentence was ballast for her entire career.) Asked to play Cleopatra, Dench says, "Well, certainly, if you want her to be a menopausal dwarf."

(Here, again, Maggie Smith upstages everyone. "Well," she says, a bizarre, faraway look on her face, "I *did* play Cleopatra. But I was intimidated. So I played it only in Canada." She offers this anecdote as if it were some part of universal experience--as if we've all been there. "Oh, yes. Cleopatra. I'll sign on. But only in Canada." The other women regard Maggie with polite, quiet smiles--which is maybe something she has grown accustomed to, in this life.)

Discovery is seeing the same thing everyone else sees--but then noticing something new. Here were these four women, collecting priceless anecdotes ("How DARE you ask if I have a minder--! I just did seven weeks in A WINTER'S TALE!") They were calling out to be filmed; to be photographed with glasses of champagne; to be asked about success, fear, death, sex, Shakespeare, macular degeneration.

The ladies are funny and wise--no surprise. You leave the theater wanting to do a bit better in your own life. We can't all be Maggie Smith, clearly, but we can reach--sometimes. We can study the greats. 

P.S. This movie features one of my favorite performers doing a few bars from one of my favorite songs: Young Judi Dench doing "Don't Tell Mama." Oh, to have been in that theater! 

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