Sir Edward and the Wicked Witch | News | yesweekly.com – Yes! Weekly
Edward Burlando, called Sir Edward to his former students, moved to North Carolina for an affair of the heart.
“Now that I’m out of the closet at 78, I can put it plainer,” he told me and photographer Ciara Kelly when we visited his garden tribute to Pride and the Wicked Witch.
“Thirty years ago, I got my first job here, waiting tables at Red Lobster,” he said while serving us ice tea and nuts on his shaded patio. “I’d been a professional actor and have what used to be the standard American stage accent.”
Think of the late great Christopher Plummer, who was born in Toronto, but like the Missouri-born Vincent Price or Mississippi-born James Earl Jones, learned to enunciate the way almost all classically-trained North American actors did before Marlon Brando.
“People at Red Lobster, Giovanni’s, and Noble’s would ask where I was from. I’d say Staten Island. My accent still puzzled them, but rather than saying I didn’t sound like a New Yorker, they’d change the subject by asking what made me move here. I’d smile wistfully and say ‘oh, affairs of the heart.’”
That was Danny, with whom he lived with for seven years in New York until Sir Edward’s parents moved to Florida and sold all their property. “I no longer had any family in the city, other than the multi-millionaire sibling I don’t speak to. Danny’s parents lived in Greensboro and I got along really well with them.”
The Triad was green, warm, and cheaper to live in than the Big Apple, so the couple moved here, where he’s lived ever since. His clientele would inquire if his ‘Affair of the Heart’ had ended in marriage.
“I just said that marriage was never in our future. As I got older and bolder, I might add ‘besides, it wouldn’t be legal,’ and they’d look either shocked or not-so-shocked, and leave it at that.”
Now it’s legal, but he lives alone in his trailer full of memories and memorabilia, growing the San Marzano tomatoes he gave me and Ciara. “I had to learn about them here. My parents were Northern Italian, from near the French border, and didn’t know what a tomato was until they came to Staten Island. They cooked with butter and cream and wine, not tomatoes.”
He is rightfully proud of his garden, where he grows not only his delicious tomatoes, but squash and enormous zucchini, and a rainbow assortment of flowers. “The centerpiece is a tribute to the Wicked Witch of the West, who was a friend of mine, and one of the best people I’ve ever known.”
He means Margaret Hamilton, the former schoolteacher who achieved cinematic immortality by cackling “I’ll get you, my pretty, and your little dog, too!” in the 1939 classic The Wizard of Oz. Hamilton also played witches in 13 Ghosts (the original 1960 version) and on Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood and Sesame Street.
“We were both actors in summer stock, where we did several plays together, including The Man Who Came to Dinner. I have never met another actor as kind and sweet as she was. We used to talk and eat sandwiches together during our breaks in the Kenley Players.”
Summer Stock is the term for the professional theatrical companies that once regularly toured the country every summer. The Kenley Players was a famous and pioneering summer stock company that presented hundreds of productions featuring Broadway, film, and television stars in Midwestern cities between 1940 and 1996.
Sir Edward also knew the troubled superstar the Wicked Witch threatened in 1939, and who died from an accidental overdose on June 22, 1969. The Stonewall Riots, which Pride Month commemorates, began six days later.
“In the closet days, homosexuals called themselves Friends of Dorothy. I was briefly a literal friend, or at least acquaintance, of Dorothy, although I didn’t actually know Miss Garland as well as I knew Miss Hamilton.”
He met Garland by waiting on her and her fourth husband Mark Herron during the couple’s brief 1965-66 marriage. “He produced her shows with her and her daughter Liza at the London Palladium, but we met in Los Angeles. Herron was Garland’s second gay husband. Her first was Liza’s father Vincent Minelli.”
This was at Le Petit Escoffier restaurant at the Beverly Hilton Hotel, where Sir Edward worked while in college. “I was actually still a busboy when I met them. I could tell that Mark had his eye on me, and I tried to keep my distance, but he kept chatting me up, and so did his new wife. I was already making extremely good tips for a busboy, primarily because my theatrical training enabled me to act ‘Continental’ even though I’d never been to the Continent and spoke no French. I was the first busboy they promoted to waiter, which was a huge honor. Of course, once I was a waiter, I talked to Judy and her husband more. I think she could tell that I wasn’t interested in him, and between that and my having such sophisticated manners at such a young age, I amused her.”
In 1967, Sir Edward competed against former Disney child star Tommy Kirk (Old Yeller, The Shaggy Dog) on ABC’s The Dating Game. On that classic game show, a “bachelorette” would choose between three hidden and unnamed “bachelors” after asking each the same questions. Most early episodes featured a woman choosing between three men. Sometimes, one of those men would be a Special Guest Star, whose identity was allegedly unknown to the bachelorette. Unlikely celebrity “bachelors” included Paul Lynde and Michael Jackson.
When a celebrity competed, the contest was fixed. The bachelorette “chose” the 26-year-old Kirk, who was also gay (and whose film career essentially ended after a pot bust three years earlier) over the 24-year-old Burlando.
“When I was going to my car with the clock they gave me as a consolation prize, she pulled up beside me in the parking lot and said she would have chosen me if she’d been allowed a choice,” he said with a laugh.
I told him that at least he didn’t lose to a serial killer. That quip referred to Rodney Alcala, The Dating Game’s most infamous contestant, who competed on the show in 1977, murdered at least eight women between 1977 and 1979, and died last month in California State Prison (the bachelorette chose Alcala, but fortunately declined the arranged date, declaring him too creepy).
“At least not as far as we know,” said Sir Edward, then added, “Tommy, if you read this, that’s a joke!”
Hearing our laughter, a woman and two children waved from a nearby trailer. “It’s nice to see so many Black and brown people living here now,” said Sir Edward, “rather than the white men with Confederate flags on their pickup trucks who were my original neighbors.”
During the years he waited tables in Greensboro and High Point, he also worked in Rome, Tahiti, Bora Bora, and Colombia as a travel director for a large pharmaceutical company. “I traveled the world eight weeks out of the year. People would ask me what I did with the rest of my time, and I’d say, I’m just a waiter, which astonished them. But what other occupation would allow me to do that? I’m fortunate to have never held a regular job in my life.”
Not quite “just a waiter.” He taught table etiquette for nine years at High Point University. “They have this beautiful restaurant where students pay to learn how to behave in a fine dining establishment. I showed them to pull out chairs for their guest, how to fold a napkin, how to eat with the fork in the left hand and the knife in the right like the rest of the world, who consider Americans barbaric for holding the fork in our right.”
That’s where he earned his nickname. “So many times, when traveling, I run into former students, who shake my hand and say ‘thank you, Sir Edward, I think I owe my job to you.’ I left High Point University last year because I cannot wear a mask and do what I do, as a trained actor needs to communicate with his face.”
He also acted in Greensboro.
“I was Van Helsing in Dracula, and Georges, the male lead, in the production of La Cage Aux Folles that got so many protests that Guilford County defunded the Greensboro Arts Council. I heard we hit the New York Times but never saw the write-up.”
Google shows that the article was “Across the U.S., Brush Fires over Money for the Arts,” which made the cover of the Aug. 14, 1996, issue. The article describes how, after 250 Baptist protesters were bused into Greensboro and stormed the Guilford County Board of Commissioners meeting, that board voted to eliminate all funding for the arts from its 1997-98 budget.
“The Carolina Theater was picketed and there was a bomb threat and the police department brought bomb-sniffing dogs, which didn’t find anything. We went on and performed anyway. Because of comments I made on NPR, I got invited to give a speech at the Gay Pride Parade in Carrboro, where Mike Nelson became the first openly gay mayor elected in North Carolina.”
While growing up in Greenwich Village, Sir Edward caught the acting bug from his aunt Pierina Burlando, who with her Bruno Della Santina, starred in a soap opera that was the most popular Italian-language radio program in America. Radio drama didn’t immediately end with the rise of television, as many believe, but continued to air nationally until 1962.
Under the name Penny Santon, his Aunt Pierina was one of the original Italian mothers on Alka-Seltzer’s ‘That’s some spicy meatball!’ TV commercials. She also played Laverne’s grandmother on Laverne & Shirley, Captain Furillo’s mother on Hill Street Blues, and Klinger’s mother on AfterMASH, and had guest roles on Kojak, Kolchak the Night Stalker, and TJ Hooker. Her husband appeared on The Andy Griffith Show, Gomer Pyle, I Dream of Jeanie, and as a waiter in Hitchcock’s Vertigo.
“When I was little, she would take me to the studio where she recorded her radio show, and I was fascinated by the scripts and the microphones and how the actors made you see stories with their voices.”
“She told me ‘If you want to be an actor, you can’t talk like a New Yorker,’ so I learned Theater English and started going to auditions.”
During the shutdown, Sir Edward, like Voltaire’s Candide, learned to cultivate his garden. That’s where he built his tribute to the Wicked Witch of the West and the Dorothy. He wants people to drive by and see what he’s grown and made, and asked YES! Weekly to print his address, which is in a cul-de-sac in a trailer park at 5626 Atwater Drive in Adam’s Farm.
“In May, I found these mannequin legs sticking out of the dumpster and thought, Pride Month is coming up in June, and LGBTQ History Month in October. So, I put striped socks on the legs, made glittery red sippers and a witch’s hat, and created a Wizard of Oz tableau. It’s wonderful-looking during the day, but even better at night. I keep it out until 2 a.m., and it’s lit up in green lighting, just like the Emerald City. There’s no place like home, but right now, mine is also Oz.”