"I invented Edna because I hated her.... I poured out my hatred of the standards of the little people of their generation."

Wrote Barry Humphries, quoted in "Barry Humphries (Dame Edna to You, Possums) Is Dead at 89/Bewigged, bejeweled and bejowled, Mr. Humphries’s creation was one of the longest-lived characters ever channeled by a single performer" (NYT).

Dame Edna emerged when the young Mr. Humphries, under the sway of Dadaism, was performing with a repertory company based at the University of Melbourne.... On long bus tours, he entertained his colleagues with the character of Mrs. Norm Everage — born Edna May Beazley in Wagga Wagga, Australia, sometime in the 1930s — an ordinary housewife who had found sudden acclaim after winning a nationwide competition, the Lovely Mother Quest. 

Unthinkable as it seems, Edna was dowdy then, given to mousy brown hair and pillbox hats. But she was already in full command of the arsenal of bourgeois bigotries that would be a hallmark of her later self...

I loved Dame Edna. (Click my "Dame Edna" tag.) But not everyone appreciated this sort of humor: 

"And I said, 'Look, I need to look my age!' He said... 'You need a little soft, double chin."

"'A soft little pillow, a little cushion under your chin.' And do you know what he did? I saw him delving in a sort of white box, a freezer. And he pulled out a little shrink-wrapped package. It looked like a chicken breast. And he said, 'We'll stitch this on. And it will settle in. And it will give you a lovely double chin.' And I said, 'What is that?' He said, 'What? More like what was it, Edna ... That was Elizabeth Taylor's left love handle.' Elizabeth Taylor's love handle is now my soft, little chin. And if you look at it very closely, you can see some indentations where Richard Burton's fingers held. ... Isn't it beautiful? It's history in my face. History."

Said Dame Edna.

A sex therapist on CNN attributes Anthony Weiner's troubles to "high levels of testosterone."

Not long after Weiner's news conference yesterday, at about 5:20, Wolf Blitzer interviewed Dr. Laura Berman, who said (my transcription):

[Weiner is] known for being very aggressive, for being very volatile. He clearly — even his hairline and his jawbone — he clearly is a man who has a tremendous amount of testosterone. That's not an excuse, but if you look at him, if you look at Arnold Schwarzenegger, if you look at most of these high power men, who are highly aggressive men, and they get into all this sexual trouble. It's often hand in hand with high levels of testosterone, which means that he has an extremely high libido.

His hairline and his jawbone, eh?

Interestingly, Berman's website calls her "America's leading expert in female sexual health." She has a show on the Oprah Winfrey Network called "In the Bedroom with Dr. Laura Berman."

Watch as this New York Times best-selling author and a Sirius XM radio host makes house calls to help couples confront their intimacy issues head on.

House calls, eh? That's so Dame Edna's Neighborhood Watch.

Anyway. Speaking of Dame Edna and high testosterone, here's Dame Edna interviewing Charlton Heston (in 1987):



By the way, Heston talks about his gray velour g-string. "What a practical color, Chuck — gray! — isn't it?"  Not to be confused with Weiner's gray panties.