In 2014 he produced and directed the smash-hit "I’ll Say She Is", the first ever revival of the Marx Brothers hit 1924 Broadway show in the NY International Fringe Festival. He has directed his own plays, revues and solo pieces at such venues as Joe’s Pub, La Mama, HERE, Dixon Place, Theater for the New City, the Ohio Theatre, the Brick, and 6 separate shows in the NY International Fringe Festival. Trav has been in the vanguard of New York’s vaudeville and burlesque scenes since 1995 when he launched his company Mountebanks, presenting hundreds of acts ranging from Todd Robbins to Dirty Martini to Tammy Faye Starlite to the Flying Karamazov Brothers. He has written for the NY Times, the Village Voice, American Theatre, Time Out NY, Reason, the Villager and numerous other publications. (is best known for his books "No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous" (2005) and "Chain of Fools: Silent Comedy and Its Legacies from Nickelodeons to Youtube" (2013). And I’m sure the role didn’t make her any poorer. But she seemed to bear it with a good grace. The structure of this interview - especially the closing slug which seems to disregard everything the woman just said - gives a pretty good picture of her situation. An educated and sophisticated woman with many past roles to her credit, she didn’t like being exclusively identified with a fussy but loving elder, given to putting up jars of jam and dispensing folksy wisdom. You’ll be interested to discover that the creator of this iconic, idyllic role rankled at the part. She returned to her native North Carolina in retirement, and gave this interview at the time. The Aunt Bee gig began in 1960 with The Andy Griffith Show, which ran through 1968, then continued with the ever increasingly anachronistic Mayberry R.F.D. Bavier played numerous roles on screens big and small over the years. Other notable stage productions included On Borrowed Time (1938), and Orson Welles’ production of Richard Wright’s Native Son (1941-1943).īy the time of her film debut in 1951’s The Day the Earth Stood Still, her physique and personality had changed into something more resembling the one we associate with Aunt Bee. Her first (of a dozen) Broadway shows was The Black Pit in 1935. She attended the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, then broke into vaudeville in the 1920s. Samuel Williams, has said.Today is the birthday of Frances Bavier (1902-1989) best known to audiences today as Aunt Bee from T he Andy Griffith Show.īavier attended Columbia University with the original intention of being a schoolteacher. But in her later years, she became reclusive and increasingly referred to herself as Aunt Bee and continued to wear her hair in a bun, her lawyer and a close friend for many years, J. I'm seriously considering that,'' she said, to which her husband replied: ``Oh, my God.''Įarly in her retirement, Bavier sought to escape identification with her television past. ``There's a college course you can take now in Charlotte. Kendrick watches the show at home every day, and says she plans to bone up on her Griffith history. You just want to take a little bit of that home.'' ``She was on television so long and so much a part of your life and you watched her. Everybody wants a little bit of Aunt Bee to take home with them,'' Kendrick said. ``It'll go in a storage room right now, in a corner that he won't touch.īud Kendrick and his wife, Penny walked out of the sale with a writing table, slightly water-stained but a priceless treasure by their standards. ``He's a fan and he better not use it,'' she said. The rake went to Glennie Bell of nearby Garner, who said it was for her husband. ``This is what she lived with and what she sat on and what she ate, held and touched,'' said Priscilla Bratcher, a director at the university's Center for Public Television.īooks, mostly novels, and lamps were most popular amid the end tables, chests of drawers and furniture. What didn't get snapped up before lunch then went up for an afternoon auction. The Andy Griffith Show star Frances Bavier never really appreciated her role as Aunt Bee on the series, according to co-star Ken Berry. One of Bavier's last wishes was to leave the contents of her Siler City home to the University of North Carolina Center for Public Television endowment fund.Īnd you could find it all during a morning sale open to the public, some of whom traveled from as far away as Minnesota and Florida for the buying and bidding. The actress, who died in December at age 86, portrayed the matronly head of the Taylor household in the popular ``Andy Griffith Show,'' which is nearing its 30th anniversary and enjoying continued life in syndication. Just about anything at the late Frances Bavier's house went up for sale yesterday. You can buy a velvet Elvis portrait anywhere, but only this weekend could you get a great deal on Aunt Bee's rake.
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