(A S Hamrah, known to us affectionately as “The Hammer”, as in, “And the hammer came down…”, has always astounded us with the precision of his observations and the general power of his critical punch. Recently, he interviewed Lynda Carter, better known as Wonder Woman. The first few paragraphs of this interview can be found below.)
“You look hot.” The first words Lynda Carter spoke to me were a variation of the same ones I had spent more than 30 years waiting to say to her. But Ms. Carter did not mean “hot” that way. What she meant was that I was a mess, and sweating. By the time my long wait to meet her was over—it ended at the Thalia restaurant in midtown on a humid afternoon last Wednesday—I was in rough shape.
I had had a few decades to prepare for this interview with Wonder Woman. When I finally got the chance, the one superpower I possess kicked in—my ability to melt when the dew point hits 60. The closet thing I resembled to a superhero was Frosty the Snowman, in warm weather, two eyes made out of coal swimming in a pool of water.
I had just gotten off a delayed flight at J.F.K. Sitting at the bar waiting for Ms. Carter, wearing the same clothes I had been in for the past 28 hours, during which time I had not slept because the guy sitting next to me on the plane spent the flight jabbing me with his elbow while playing video games on an iPad, I could not be trusted to hold a door for her, much less coherently discuss her days as Wonder Woman on television, her singing gig at Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Allen Room or her new recording, Crazy Little Things. Where was the bartender with that soda water I ordered?
Before he could deliver it, Ms. Carter appeared in the doorway of the restaurant, silhouetted by the noon sun streaming in from Eighth Avenue, outlined like a four-color drawing in a comic book but in 3-D.
[The rest of this article can be found at The New York Observer.]
