The lady to the left of me had seen her four times before. The man to the right of me (my friend Terry) had flown in from Hawaii to see her, with seven of his friends. One of the two sisters we met in the bar before the show had put down $6,000, once, to see her in Vegas, which was absolutely worth it, she said, even though she can't stand her politics.
When Barbra Streisand stepped out on stage in Brooklyn for the first time since high school, she could have hummed the telephone book and the crowd would still have loved her. (To give you an idea of constituency: the biggest cheers of the night went up during the photo montage for a street sign of Nostrand Avenue and a shot of Judy Garland.)
"Who says you can't go home again?" said Babs, and off she went.
These were notional, if not literal, Brooklynites. While the rest of the country stayed in to watch the VP debate, most of New Jersey was moving around the Barclays Center, patiently queuing for the loo, putting down $14 for a gin and tonic and wondering vaguely what they'd done with their parking tickets.
Two hours before the concert, a lone Babs nut stood outside the auditorium with a welcome home sign, mobbed by cameras with nothing else to report. Slowly, the numbers swelled and the conversations followed a familiar pattern: fan oneupmanship, reminiscences of other concerts and, like evangelicals at a revival, story swapping of what brought them to Babs in the first place.
For the sisters in the bar, it was a life-long love. "I look like Barbra and my sister looks like Bette Midler," explained the Streisand lookalike, while her sister shot her daggers and held out Babs-like talons for a photo-op.
For my friend Terry, it was as a kid, hearing her sing the love theme to the movie Eyes of Laura Mars – "second greatest hits album," he said automatically, for the benefit of lesser fans.
"Track 10?" joked a friend.
"Track two, actually," said Terry.
Two men waiting in line at the concession stand discussed Streisand's work in the 70's. "You're confusing Woman in Love with Woman in the Moon," said one gently, and his friend clapped a hand over his mouth in pure horror.
In this context, Streisand herself was almost superfluous to need. But there she was, only half an hour late and backed by a 60 piece orchestra. The opening number, As If We Never Said Goodbye, rung every bead of nostalgia from the occasion, as did Streisand's banter.
"The last time I sung solo here was on somebody's stoop on Pulaski Street," she said, and the crowd went wild – well, as wild as a crowd who nothing short of an earthquake will get out of their seats once they're settled.
There had been rumours of a special guest star, which everyone hoped would be Neil Diamond, a fellow graduate of Erasmus High School, but turned out to be Streisand's son, Jason. Poor guy. After enough of his baby photos were flashed on screen to exhaust even this crowd's interest him, out he came, to stand, or rather sing in his mother's blind spot for 10 minutes. (It put one in mind of Portnoy's Complaint, when the mother says adoringly of her son, "He doesn't even have to open a book – A in everything. Albert Einstein the Second!" For a non-singer, Streisand Jnr has a pleasant voice.)
Unlike in previous shows, there was no moment of Ultimate Babs Narcissism, which reached its apex in 1994 when she dueted with two versions of herself, an onscreen playback and a singing 10 year old brought on to represent Streisand the Child.
There was, however, a moving rendition of the Way We Were, dedicated to the late Marvin Hamlisch. "You'll have to cry for me," whispered Terry, "I'm not a crier."
Reader, I cried.
And then she killed it with People.
She kept it thankfully light on politics, swearing she wouldn't tell her fans how to vote and then suggesting anyone who believes in "a woman's right to choose" can't in good conscience back Mitt Romney. But she moved swiftly on to close with Happy Days, the perfect exit number. And then she surprised us.
Streisand has been famous for so long, one imagines she has no real connection to the life of her audience. But in a pitch-perfect closing joke, she mimicked what every wife would say to her husband the second they left the stadium:
We should have taken the subway.
It was old Brooklyn Babs and the crowd's heart broke, for her and for themselves over decades of fanship.
There was just one unhappy customer.
"Do you know the score in the Yankees game?" asked a miserable-looking man of the steward, as he made for the exit on the arm of his wife.
"[Some baseball words]", said the steward, which depressed him further.
Everyone else was walking on air.
