Barbra Streisand's urban legend and diva moments: 6 reason we love her

Barbra Streisand has done it all. In her six-decade career, she has been a singer, an actress, an activist, a director, and an urban legend.

She is, in short, everything.

Babs was Celine before Celine, she was Beyoncé before Beyoncé (sacrilege, yes, but true). She's a pioneer, and, at 74, she's not done yet. In honor of her stop Saturday at Philadelphia's Wells Fargo Center - only the sixth tour of her career - let's look back at some of her most defining moments.

Babs burst onto Broadway with a bang in the 1962 musical I Can Get It For You Wholesale. Much of the musical, set in New York's Garment District and using Jewish harmonies in its pop-music score, was remarkable, but Streisand's tour-de-force performance as the secretary Miss Marmelstein and her eponymous song remain the stuff of legends. Rumor has it that she showed up to her audition wearing a full-length fur coat - Streisand contends that it was to fit the period of the show, which sounds just like something a burgeoning diva would say.

If you've ever been to a cabaret worth its salt, you've heard two singers power through the original mash-up. But few singers come close to the roof-raising theatrics of a late-career Judy Garland and an ingenue-era Streisand. Just try to listen to this rendition without getting teary-eyed and goose-bumpy. Just try.

No matter how you feel about Yentl, Streisand's Golden Globe-winning directorial and screenwriting debut (admit it, you love it), the film was far ahead of its time in its consideration of Jewish American identity and queer themes. The story of a young Jewish woman who must disguise herself as a man in order to pursue her dream of studying the Talmud, Yentl was delayed for more than a decade as Streisand fought to find the right team and backers for it. Eventually, it hit theaters in 1983, making a splash at the box office, earning an Academy Award for its score, and gifting the world with the guilty pleasure of "Papa, Can You Hear Me?"

Streisand has been a fashion maven for most of her career, letting her distinctive, haut-monde look bleed into her film personae. But nothing about her appearance has been more influential than her hair. Babs has veered from bone-straight with volume, to wavy, to A Star Is Born perm. How important was Barbra Streisand's hair? The modern hair-crimping iron was invented for her. Yes, the defining hair treatment of the 1980s was made possible by the one and only Barbra Streisand.

If you've ever seen the play Buyer and Cellar, you're familiar with the urban legend about the basement of Barbra's Malibu home. Streisand recently claimed not to be familiar with this legend - despite knowing quite a bit about it - but the story goes that Babs built a mall in the cellar of her California coastal home and filled it with her own belongings. She enjoyed shopping, but not the crowds, so she created a place where she could buy things away from the public eye. According to playwright Jonathan Tollins, Streisand even went so far as to hire salespeople to wait in the "mall" for her and sell her her own stuff. You can't out Barbra Barbra.

Streisand's film debut, Funny Girl, is nothing short of extraordinary. The artist, at the top of her game, gives an electric musical-comedy performance that few have come close to emulating. Starring as the outlandish Ziegfeld Follies star Fanny Brice, Babs is on-screen for virtually every second of the 155 minute film, and she sells it all. Whether she's pratfalling on roller skates or seducing Omar Sharif, she's magnetic and charming as all get-out. She won an Oscar for the role, and it's easy to see why. Streisand was a natural-born movie star.

At once zany and stunning, she proved she was capable of the perfect mix of high drama and high camp, two qualities that would become hallmarks of her work. But nothing says Streisand more than her ethereal voice, which is on full display in Funny Girl. Whether she's crowing her famous line "Hello, gorgeous" or belting the lush anthem "People," her voice is a showstopper. But for this writer's money, there's no greater Barbra moment than the bombastic Act One closer "Don't Rain on My Parade." In this epic self-empowerment anthem, Barbra charges across the city, boards a train, hails a taxi, and ends up hitching a ride on a tug boat. It is, literally, everything. And it's the perfect introduction to one of stage and screen's greatest stars.