mishpocheh.
Her “Employee of the Month” series of chats at the Public Theater’s Joe’s Pub in downtown Manhattan featured sassy challenges to celebrity interviewees like the Jewish playwright Wallace Shawn, who in September 2014 languidly claimed to have considered a job as a taxi driver decades earlier.
Lazarus brightly retorted, “I just can’t imagine you driving a cab; you would go so slow!” Then she collapsed with laughter at the mere idea of the lethargic Shawn pitted against the hurly-burly of Manhattan traffic.
Or in September 2015, when the personal shopper and stylist Betty Halbreich of German Jewish origin, profanely dissed the sister of her friend Joan Rivers. Lazarus retorted to Halbreich with an ironic grin, “I can see why you and Joan were good friends.”