Look! It's Carol Channing--in the rotten New York Times!

Carol Channing is in today's New York Times (you know, the paper that buried the domestic spying scandal until the 2004 election was safely over?), ignoring her interviewer and her co-interviewee. And rightly so! I certainly don't care what Jesse Green or Tovah Feldshuh has to say either--do you? (A: No, you do not.)

CHANNING "Before the parade passes by, before it all moves on and only I'm left."

Q Ms. Feldshuh, you begin rehearsals tomorrow and I want to ask you —

CHANNING "I'm ready to move out in front!" See, it's not just her, it's everybody. She's going to get Cornelius and Barnaby out of that basement to rejoin the human race. She's going to get Mrs. Molloy out of that hat shop and — I'm sorry, I just had to finish that.

Q It's fine. Ms. Feldshuh —

CHANNING "I've had enough of just passing by life!" The boys have got to do it, the girls, the chorus, the lyric sopranos, the bass voices. Everybody's got to rejoin the human race.

Q Now, Ms. Feldshuh, what are the givens of the character?

CHANNING I saw it in London without Dolly! It was an ensemble piece until Wilder added Dolly. And then one Wednesday matinee, I realized I am Thornton Wilder.

FELDSHUH You are Thornton Wilder?

CHANNING Dolly is Thornton Wilder. That's his nature up there. I got to know him before he died, and wasn't that a privilege? And I said, "Is it possible, Thornton, that this is the spine?" He said: "I don't know. I never thought of it."

Q Huh.

CHANNING But Tovah's got to have her own viewpoint. Otherwise the audience knows that she's copying somebody else's.