Eartha Kitt died the other day. She was an icon but she was also unusually down-to-earth, never forgetting her roots or her hard-scrabble teenage years. Her New York Times obit is a must-read for those who, like me, only knew the flashier sexier high-gloss side of this performer.
Reading of her death brought me back to another time and place, to a time when I had just finished working on a show in a small but very popular venue in Boston called Club Cabaret, in which I had the pleasure of seeing Eartha Kitt perform to an audience of fewer than 100.
This was the early 1990s and our show, a cabaret called (of all things) Alive with AIDS attempted to bring together a collection of first-hand accounts of the early days of the gay plague with a wide range of songwriters and songwriting styles to create a funny, heartwarming and moving evening of songs and scenes from the front lines.
Looking back, the show was far more successful than it had any right to be. Given that it opened in 1989, emotions were still raw from the seemingly endless string of funerals and memorial services that those of us living in the gay ghettos had grown accustomed to. It strikes me now as a miracle that it ran for months in that tiny cabaret in the back of a popular restaurant and bar called Club Cafe.
Shortly after we closed, the venue's visionary co-owner (and our producer), Joseph McAllister announced with great fanfare that he had booked the coup of the century. Ms. Eartha Kitt would play his venue, for a handful of performances only. At this point Joe was already wasting away under the ravages of AIDS himself. That he managed to rally the energy for such grand plans was inspiring to all of us who knew him.
In fact, that's what most sticks in my mind when I think about those times. Joe represented something that seemed to be fading in the community at large. He represented the old-school producer who takes pride in the shows he presents. As a restaurant and bar owner, he didn't have to book shows into the back room or local singers into the front room's piano bar. He did so because he was passionate about performers, about music and theatre and wanted to stake his claim to a place in the center of it all.
I had written a couple of songs for the cabaret and I remember how even up to the last visit I paid him in his apartment on Clarendon Street, when he was very very weak and short of breath, he still referred to me by the affectionate nickname he'd chosen for me—Mozart. From anyone else, I'd have bristled, but from Joe it felt like I was somehow being crowned with a special honor every time he called me that. It still makes me smile when I hear his voice calling to me as I entered a room. "Hey. look who's here! It's Mozart!"
I don't remember much of Eartha Kitt's performance in that venue apart from a warm and fuzzy feeling at sitting not 20 feet from a legend and feeling as though I was lucky to have had the opportunity. Before he died, Joe brought other legends to his cabaret, among them Jimmy James, Yma Sumac and Jim Bailey, who in his unrivaled impersonation of Judy Garland, really did make me feel as though I'd had the unique experience of seeing Ms. Garland up close.
Reading of Eartha Kitt made me miss Joe all over again and what he has come to represent to me—a brand of gay man full of unbridled enthusiasm for the artistic adventure, a true impresario. It was perhaps predictable that shortly after Joe's death, the performances in Club Cabaret began to dwindle and eventually the piano was removed from the front room altogether.
I miss those days when one could walk a few blocks for a bite to eat and perhaps enjoy some unexpected magical performance while downing a smart cocktail and an appetizer called "Chicken La Mirage."
