Gay men, Jews and showbiz nuts of a certain age can tell you that Bette Midler got her start in the early 1970s playing to an adoring room of towel-clad men at the Continental Baths, a gay bathhouse on the Upper West Side, with a young Barry Manilow as her pianist. True fans know that when Manilow left to pursue his own career after producing Midler's first album, an epic feud ensued, which only ended a decade ago. Calling herself "The Divine Miss M," Midler took old material and made it her own, singing 1960s-girl-group songs and retelling the bawdy jokes of the early-20th-century Russian-born comedian Sophie Tucker. On Friday night at the Laurie Beechman Theatre in Midtown, the longtime Midler impersonator Donna Maxon paid tribute to that era, with help from the deadpan drag-king pianist Fonda Feingold as Manilow, in "Bette and Barry: Back to the Bathhouse." Maxon was uncanny in imitating Midler's look and manner of speech, if not the diva's powerful singing voice, as she delivered a rambling tale that began in the cabaret room of the Continental Baths before becoming a very loose chronicle of the parallel careers of Midler and Manilow, complete with amateur-hour covers of "Beast of Burden" (the Stones classic, which Midler covered), "Copacabana," "The Wind Beneath My Wings" and " (You Got to Have) Friends," with which Midler closed her bathhouse shows. A big black-and-white photo of bathhouse-era Midler and Manilow, whom Maxon called "The Dynamic Jew-O," was displayed throughout. "Those were the days, my friends," Maxon said, more than once. All my friends were doing drugs - not medications. Later, she acknowledged that many of the men in Midler's original audiences had since died of AIDS before playing a touching version of the Beatles" "In My Life." The sweetest moments came when Maxon revealed that her drummer was a Canarsie high-school buddy and that she'd met Feingold at the dog run. The performance had more in common with a slightly slack piece of suburban dinner theater than the riotous genius of the original, but it was a heartwarming evening, nonetheless.