Gypsy Revival on Broadway

BERNADETTE LAZZARA didn't want to go on the road. She was finishing the eighth grade at P.S. 58 in Queens and preferred to stay home with her Ozone Park friends. To them, at least, she was a normal kid. She told them as little as possible about her other life, the life across the river in Manhattan: the dancing lessons, the singing lessons, the go-sees and auditions.

They must have known anyway; she had been performing in public since she was a panelist on "Juvenile Jury" at age 3. Now, at 13, she was a pro. She'd had her Equity card for several years already ?- got it doing a play called "This Is Goggle," which was directed by Otto Preminger and mercifully closed out of town. The reviews were scalding (one was headlined "I'm Gagging on `Goggle' ") but did include a mention of the petite blonde making her legit debut: "The audience seemed to be captivated by a tiny tot who had a rear end shaped like a Bartlett pear." Apparently, in 1958, you could write that way about a 9-year-old girl. It could even be considered a rave! Or at least it seemed like one to her mother, Marguerite, who repeated it so often that, 46 years later, Bernadette remembers it word for word. If indeed that's how the quotation ran. Perhaps Marguerite (her daughter sometimes wonders) altered it, "improved" it, just a bit.

Marguerite had certainly "improved" her daughter. For one thing, the girl was not in fact a blonde. "She would tint my hair a little," she remembers now. "When I would say, `What are you doing?' she'd say, `Oh, I'm just putting a little conditioner on it.' But slowly my hair got blonder and blonder!"