There’s nothing quite like an evening stroll along Circular Quay that ends at Sydney’s Opera House. Luna Park glitters across the water as you look towards the north shore. The Bridge, cafes and bars spilling with life – locals and tourists mingling in that easy, unhurried way that only Sydney seems to permit. Cap it all off with the city’s annual homage to light, VIVID, and you’re reminded yet again why this harbour city is so captivating. There’s a buzz, but peace is in the air too, and a sense of human connection that’s also loving the beauty that surrounds it.
Crowds head north towards Bennelong Point, where the majestic Opera House sits waiting for all comers. On this particular evening, the standout attraction is an unstoppable force of nature from the United States – Fran Lebowitz. A remarkable woman. And how remarkably she lived up to that description as she connected with her adoring audience that filled the room.
Inside the Concert Hall, the laughter came early and never really stopped. It rolled in waves – explosive, the kind that doubles you over while you’re still processing the punchline. Lebowitz doesn’t warm up. She’s already sizzling.
She was interviewed on stage to begin with – a gentle enough opening – but when she steps to the microphone to answer previously submitted questions from the audience, something shifts. This is Lebowitz in full form: unrehearsed, unfiltered, utterly in command. The ad lib is her art form, that looks effortless and is anything but.
Direct? You’d almost think she was Australian. But it’s unmistakably a New York state of mind that dominates the two hours spent in her company – a city she has chronicled, complained about, celebrated and refused to leave for fifty years. A creature of Manhattan, Lebowitz once said she has no plans to travel anywhere that isn’t New York City, on the grounds that she hasn’t finished with it yet!
She told the Sydney audience she started talking at nine months. Ten minutes in, you believed her completely.
Witty, playful, authentic – Lebowitz is one of those rare people who has never needed to perform being themselves because being themselves has always been performance enough. In a world growing increasingly plastic, she is real. No filter, no brand, no carefully managed persona. Just Fran – sharp as a tack and twice as pointed.
Her books, Metropolitan Life and Social Studies, published decades ago, remain timeless. Filmmaker Martin Scorsese, a long-time friend, captured her so beautifully in the Netflix series Pretend It’s a City. The title alone is pure Lebowitz: a piece of advice she offers to people who find New York overwhelming. Pretend it’s a city. Act accordingly.
Its seems she has mingled with everyone: Andy Warhol, Toni Morrison, Mick Jagger. A friend to writers and artists whose names read like a cultural honour roll of the late twentieth century, she remains, somehow unimpressed with it all.
The crowd at the Opera House got the full treatment. One of the evening’s great moments came when Lebowitz recounted an encounter with a man she described as – let’s say – formidably built and not immediately the kind of person you’d expect to engage on matters of usage. He said something involving the word mouses. Lebowitz, incapable of letting it pass, corrected him. The word is mice, she explained. He stared. She stared back. Grammar won.
Her obsession with language and grammar is love: for words, for precision. It’s the same impulse that drives her essays, her interviews, her legendary opinions on topics ranging from the internet (against), exercise (against), and the decline of New York’s restaurant culture (strongly against).
Walking back along the Quay afterwards, the lights of Vivid Sydney still painting the sky, you felt the lightness that follows two hours in the company of someone who tells the truth and makes it funny.
Lebowitz gave Sydney something money can’t buy – the reminder that a voice, allowed to be itself, is the most dazzling spectacle of all.
