Like her fellow Detroit export Iggy Pop, Elaine Stritch is a punk who doesn’t play by your provincial rules regarding polite decorum, morning talk shows, or properly sized eyeglasses. So when the 89-year-old actress—who’s probably most familiar to A.V. Club readers for 30 Rock—appeared on Today We Watch Kathie Lee And Hoda Drink, For Tomorrow We May Die to promote the new documentary about her life, she did it with the brassy panache for which she is known. Which is to say Stritch wore enough fur to clothe the cast of Doctor Zhivago, put her feet in Kathie Lee Gifford’s lap, and barked out the word “fuck,” like we all shall do when we finally become 89-year-old women.
Kotb and Gifford—who practically dared Stritch to do it with all her talk about how Stritch just says whatever she wants to say, and isn’t that amazing?—recoiled with the shock of their shattered, barrel-aged innocence, which they’d spent years carefully preserving in merlot. “I meant a serious point by that,” Stritch says, which is that Elaine Stritch can say whatever the fuck she wants.