With all due respect to Ms. Winokur, the vote is really a referendum on whether you liked Bernadette Peters as Momma Rose.

As the play opens, Momma Rose, from the musical "Gypsy," can be heard singing: "I had a dream, baby."

The character is often referred to as "Mama Rose" (or "Momma Rose"), a sobriquet that does not appear in the script and was adamantly dismissed by its book's author, Arthur Laurents.

In the musical Gypsy, the character is called Momma, Rose, or Madame Rose, again a fictionalization.

Laura Bush, escorted by Secret Service agents but without President Bush, swept into the Shubert Theater just before the 8 p.m. curtain rise for "Gypsy," the Broadway hit with Bernadette Peters in the lead role as Momma Rose, the headstrong mother of the stripper Gypsy Rose Lee.

- as Momma Rose, a role that earned her a round of good reviews (and a few bad ones) after the show opened on May 1.

This beloved eternal daughter of the American musical has taken on that genre's most daunting maternal role: Momma Rose, a part cast in bronze by Ethel Merman more than four decades ago.

By the time Momma Rose had had her turn, they knew they had a hit.

The critical response was almost unanimous, and Ben Brantley of The New York Times wrote that Ms. Peters had pulled off "the surprise coup of many a Broadway season" and anointed her a worthy successor to Ethel Merman, the gold standard by which all Momma Roses are judged.