After the matinee, Eartha Kitt appeared backstage.   There was buzz about her being in the audience but no one thought she'd see us.  By the time the cast had been alerted, she was gone.  I, on the other hand, was ready.  I'm always completely dressed and ready to leave before the band finishes the outtro.  By the time the music ended and she was walking towards stage left, I was waiting by the water fountain, pleasantly unnerved.

She was a tiny brown-skinned woman in a floor length mink with a helmet of a bubble bee-hive hair-do on her head.  She held a slight smile upon her lips as she murmured her replies to me politely.  Thankfully, she let me take a picture with her and then another with her, Simone and myself. She left almost immediately afterwards. Everyone raced through the greenroom to try to catch her before she made her exit to do her show somewhere in the Boston area.

Polite niceties aside, I would have loved to ask her about what happened at the White House luncheon that day, when she made Ladybird Johnson cry.  She was blackballed in Hollywood for years by LBJ because of it.  Did she regret it? And what about Orson Welles?  Her life as a dancer with Katherine Dunham?  As a star on the cabaret circuit in Paris in the 50's? I loved the way she took the stage with absolute authority, and how she was so completely feminine about it.

I didn't realize it at the time, but when I was much younger and obsessing over old movies and tv shows that featured black girls like Nina Mae McKinney, Josephine Baker and Freddie Washington, I was developing my own icons.  I was attempting to validate who I was by looking for images of me.  Subconsciously, I was also doing quite a bit of homework with details like make-up, lighting and costume.  More on that later.

Miss Kitt  turned away from us in one precise motion, her coat sweeping around her like a cape, her entourage waiting at the side door.  Suddenly, she stopped and faced us and held her finger in the air and said, "Never give up.  Never."

And with that she was gone.