Happy Birthday to the sensational Jo Anne Worley!

There are some stars who are simply a force of nature and that is the only way to describe the fabulous Jo Anne Worley who turns 73 years young today.

Best known for her years on Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In, Jo Anne has been dazzling audiences on television and on the stage for decades. And after seeing her one-woman show at The Magic Castle in Hollywood last year, I can assure you she is still in excellent form.

“I love to make you laugh, I love to make people laugh,” she told us at the top of that show. “I really remember the very first laugh I got in public. It was in church and I was about five … I remember singing Silent Night and I really let it out (she had her big voice even then) and from then on, I never sang again, I just mouthed the words. I didn’t want to get hollered at. But I had a lot of time to look at the people in the audience and I’d take the gum out of my mouth and do things with it and the people would laugh and it felt so good.”

Her stories were hilarious, especially the one about her first big show, Billy Barnes People, in which she had all kinds of wardrobe problems including one night when her skirt fell to the floor during the bows and the persistent problem of the rhinestones from her black outfit continually falling off.

“The stage manager finally had to teach me a lesson and he took everyone into the green room and he ripped me of my rhinestones like a soldier getting his stripes ripped off his uniform and he said: “For two months Jo Anne, you’re going to do the show without rhinestones.” I think that’s why even now I play to the back row because I’m searching for those missing rhinestones. I overcompensate!”

JoAnne (that’s me pictured with her, left) is still going strong appearing on Broadway in The Drowsy Chaperone and in Wicked during seven months of its run at The Pantages Theatre.

She’s played so many of the great stage roles in theaters across the country including Mama Rose in Gypsy and the leads in Hello Dolly! Anything Goes, Annie Get Your Gun, Once Upon a Mattress and many more.

Happy birthday to one of the great ladies of showbiz!