08/13/2025
When Lianne Marie Dobbs performs her cabaret concert, “The Windmills of My Mind…for Dusty Springfield,” at Feinstein’s at the Nikko on August 23, she’ll dig deep beneath hits like “I Only Want to Be With You,” “Son of a Preacher Man,” and “You Don’t Own Me” to probe the Springfield psyche.
While some consider Springfield an icon, the British singer born Mary O’Brien, is generally underappreciated. In part, that’s due to her untimely 1999 death from cancer at age 59.
But there’s little doubt that Springfield’s relatively low posthumous public profile is also due to the fact that, from the beginning of her career in the 1960s, she lived fairly openly as a q***r woman.
“She never had a beard, she brought her girlfriends to music industry parties and events in L.A. and London,” Dobbs told the Bay Area Reporter in a recent telephone interview. But at the very beginning of her career, she didn’t feel she could be out to the public. Before long though, Springfield began, a bit equivocally, to acknowledge her sexuality in interviews.
When Lianne Marie Dobbs performs her cabaret concert, “The Windmills of My Mind…for Dusty Springfield,” at Feinstein’s at the Nikko on August 23, she’ll dig deep beneath hits like “I Only Want to Be With You,” “Son of a Preacher Man,” and “You Don’t Own Me” to probe the Sprin...
