Fran Lebowitz is going to walk onto the stage of the Michigan Theater at 8 p.m., on Saturday, October 7. Once there, she will be taking questions from and speaking to the audience about current events, life, and anything else that comes up.
“We are very excited to bring Fran Lebowitz to the Michigan Theater this Saturday, Oct 7! Moderator Doug Tribou will lead the conversation with Fran, and we are expecting a witty, wild, and wonderful discussion onstage,” Michigan Theater Assistant Director of Events and Presentations Hannah Feuka said. “Fran will light up our stage at 8p.m. this Saturday and will be a refreshing act for the politicians and comedians of Ann Arbor [and] Metro Detroit area.”
The humorist and social commentator originally came to prominence as an essayist I the 1960s, rubbing shoulders as an intellectual wit in the last century’s counter-culture era and working for Andy Wharhol’s Interview magazine. Her essays were eventually collected into the volumes Social Studies and Metropolitan Life.
A chain smoking, wry and deeply intelligent observer, Lebowitz made a name for herself with her honest and takes-no-prisoners observations of the contradictions, uncomfortable truths, beauty and absurdities of life. She came out as gay around the same time and has continued on as a longstanding bastion of New York’s intelligentsia, becoming friends with the likes of other writers like Toni Morrison.
But then a strange thing happened: writer’s block. Lebowitz hasn’t been able to write for decades and so makes her living by traveling around the country and interacting with audiences with amusing and often highly nuanced commentary on current events, often having to pause for laughter. To get a sense of what is coming Saturday, her longtime friend Martin Scorsese made a documentary mini-series about her for Netflix called “Pretend It’s A City.”
She is old fashioned in many ways, famously inhabiting an apartment with thousands of well-thumbed books and a rotary phone, but refusing, point blank, to own a cell phone or a computer of any kind. But listen to her talk about the world today, and you will realize that she is profoundly current o the modern world and very observant.
Attendees can begin entering the theater at 7 p.m. Literati will be in the lobby with copies of Lebowitz’s works.
Lebowitz’s press team declined an interview request.
Drew Saunders is a freelance business and environmental journalist who grew up just outside of Ann Arbor. He covers local business developments, embraces his foodie side with reviews restaurants, obsesses over Michigan's environmental state, loves movies, and feels spoiled by the music he gets to review for Ann Arbor!
