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On 07 November 1972, Bette Midler unleashed her debut album, The Divine Miss M, upon an unsuspecting America, and popular music was never quite the same. We put this one on the turntable and didn’t take it off for the next 6 months. It was something new, fun, and terrifically gay. Here was a brassy, bawdy, gloriously vulgar redhead with the voice of an angel, the mouth of a longshoreman, and the risqué wardrobe of a wildly flamboyant bordello madam. At New York’s Continental Baths, with Barry Manilow at the piano, where she had been belting out torch songs and dropping double entendres as shameless as her audience dropping its towels, Bette single-handedly launched a new age of nostalgia and resurrected old-fashioned showbiz glamour with enough camp to make the Boy Scout Annual Jamboree look like a church picnic. Bette and the Baths—it was a match made in heaven. Or at least in a steam room. Transferring her already legendary act to vinyl, for the LP, with Barry shaping the sound, Bette recreated forgotten oldies, reinvented girl-group classics, and made "Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy" sound as though Patty, Maxene, and LaVerne had spent a particularly memorable weekend in P-town. The album became a smash, went platinum, and earned Bette the Grammy Award for Best New Artist. America had discovered its newest sweetheart—but one more likely to tell a dirty joke than kiss a baby. And the gays sanctified their very own goddess. Fifty-four years later, The Divine Miss M remains a monument to talent, theatrical excess, and the enduring proposition that good taste is terribly overrated.🏳️‍🌈