Author: Erik Brady
Buffalo gals, won’t you come out tonight
Come out tonight, come out tonight
Buffalo gals, won’t you come out tonight
And dance by the light of the moon?
Christine Baranski is a Buffalo gal. And on Wednesday night, the actress appeared on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” which in a postmodern world is one way to dance by the light of the moon.
“You grew up in Buffalo, New York,” Colbert said. “How much, after all these years — because you kind of scream ‘Manhattan’ at this point — how much Buffalo girl is left in you?”
Baranski grinned and used her hands as if to say, Look at this glam get-up, look at me.
“Everyone thinks this sophisticated lady, this New York type, these characters that I play, they think that’s me,” she said. “They should be in a room alone with me when I watch the Buffalo Bills. It is LOUD.”
She noted that the Bills are having a great season, then pivoted to the Super Bowl years.
“Growing up in Buffalo, you have to understand we lived through four consecutive Super Bowl losses. So I have a T-shirt that says, ‘Buffalo: A drinking town with a football problem.’ ”
This drew a laugh from Colbert as well as the audience.
Baranski – recently referred to as The First Lady of Buffalo – was on the show to promote “The Gilded Age,” her HBO drama, which debuts on Monday. The series is set in New York in the 1880s. She stars as Agnes van Rhijn, an old-money Dutch-American socialite. She actually grew up as a Polish-American latchkey kid in Cheektowaga and Buffalo. Her father died when she was 8, and her mother struggled to pay the bills.
“Even when I was studying acting at the Juilliard, I was often cast as the sophisticated best friend with the witty line, and it’s so funny to me because I do not come from a wealthy background,” she told the Guardian newspaper in a story published this week. “I’m from a blue-collar neighborhood in Buffalo, New York, and if you’re writing for the Guardian, you could say that’s like Manchester,” where the British daily newspaper began 200 years ago.
“Music was very much a part of our life,” she told The New Yorker this summer. “I remember my deepest, most vivid memory of my father. Shortly before he died, my father took me to Kleinhans Music Hall, which was the Carnegie Hall of Buffalo, to see a Polish singing troupe from Warsaw. … I grew up with people who loved performing arts, who loved music, who loved dancing, but I didn’t think of myself as destined for that life. It took me a long time to get to a point where I would audition for a play in high school. Then I wound up being the leading lady for the next two years. I was Mame in the senior-class play” at Villa Maria Academy, in Cheektowaga, in 1970.
She also joined “an avant-garde dance-and-theater company that performed in the old Pierce-Arrow plant in Buffalo. I did my first professional play, although I don’t think I got paid. I wore an actual American flag, as a minidress, and white go-go boots.”
She survived the rigors of the Juilliard School and won her first Tony in her second Broadway play, Tom Stoppard’s “The Real Thing.” (Cynthia Nixon played her daughter in that show and now plays her spinster sister on “The Gilded Age.”) Over the years Baranski frequently appeared in Stephen Sondheim musicals, and she and Sondheim became good friends. She told Colbert that she and Meryl Streep often took him out for dinner in his later years.
Baranski did not get TV roles until she was in her 40s. She played Cybill Shepherd’s alcohol-swilling best friend, Maryanne, on “Cybill,” the 1990s sitcom that gave her character a Buffalo backstory.
In one 1996 episode, Maryann goes home to Buffalo for her 25th high school reunion. Name of said episode: “Buffalo Gals.”
Two years later, Mayor Anthony Masiello proclaimed Christine Baranski Day in Buffalo. “I never really left,” she said.
That was evident the other night as she spoke with Colbert. She ended the Buffalo portion of her interview by invoking last week’s wild-card win against the New England Patriots.
“These are people who will sit in the stands for hours in subzero temperatures,” she said. “So if you are in Buffalo, you are a survivor. You know how to endure.”
Then, as the New York audience applauded, Baranski raised a fist and shouted, “Go Bills!”
True to her word, she was LOUD.