America’s Mom Sings Her Heart Out

My partner and I went last Saturday night to see Florence Henderson in her Joe’s Pub appearance downtown. I had not been downtown in a bit, and it felt kinda like visiting another city. Well, it is another city. And it’s a happening place.
Loved it. And loved seeing Henderson, who really is America’s Mom. She led us all in a group rendition of the “Brady Bunch” theme song. She called it “our National Anthem,” and she has a frighteningly good point. The only difference: we all seemed to know every word and every note of the theme song.
Before the act started, Henderson was the star of a brief film clip review. She’s had quite a career, but she goes out of her way here to stress the theater and New York-ish aspects of things. She insists she stumbled into the Brady realm. “You cannot kill it with a stick,” she says of the sitcom. “Believe me, I have tried.”
Actually, she seems good-natured about being identified as America’s Mom and you can feel the love that the audience has for her presence. She plays against type with a vengeance, though, throwing in jokes about Viagra and Tiger Woods. Mostly, though, she likes to reminisce about her days doing Broadway musicals, which clearly remain close to her heart. She lost out on the movie version of “Oklahoma,” she recounts, adding with considerable comic energy, “That little bitch Shirley Jones got it.”
Henderson’s voice is not always up to every challenge, but her show has an oddly deep emotional power. She talks movingly of being embarrassed as a teenager of her family’s poverty. She was the tenth child in her family and has a few candid things to say about how she was unsure of her mom’s love for her. Not what you expect from America’s Mom, but that makes it all the more powerful. And she delivers a killer, from-the-heart rendition of “My Old Kentucky Home.”
If FloHen comes back to the Village or anywhere near you, go. America's Mom has more heart than we even knew. How reassuring.