You’re not the prettiest girl I ever saw, and you’re not the best singer I ever heard, and you’re certainly not the best actress I ever hoped to see, but if we put them all together, we’ll find the husband we’re looking for on the stage.
Kitty Carlisle’s mother to Ms. Carlisle when she was still young, as reported this morning in the New York Times.
Later she would say to her daughter, after seeing her perform for the first time: “My dear, we’ve made a ghastly mistake.”
I’ve long had a crush on Kitty Carlisle, as I do on most dames. She died last night at 96.
There are so few true dames left. I still haven’t figured out the recipe, and the women who embody it so well – Ms. Carlisle, Ms. Stritch, a few old girls in my grandparents’ circle – are slowly aging out. Are they a product of a certain time when women were expected to be something very different and they insisted, instead, on being entirely who they were?
Give me time: it’s a nut I’m trying to crack.
There’s no evidence that Ms. Carlisle addressed her mother’s concerns directly, but she showed them to be completely wrong by living a vital life in which she performed up until this year on the stage. The New York Times reports her as saying, shortly after her 79th birthday:
”I’m more optimistic, more enthusiastic, and I have more energy than ever before.” Energy, she said, came from doing the things she wanted to do. “You get so tired when you do what other people want you to do.”
And maybe there it is.
p.s. Kitty Carlisle remembers her life in the theatre »
