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[0:00] Indira G. Wilson: Ladies and gentlemen, we invite your apprehensive listening.

[0:03] KITT SHAPIRO: How would you define the term breakthrough for yourself? My daughter and I would just say to her, I can't do this. I'm just, I don't, I'm not doing it. I'm just not doing it. And she said, if you don't do it, are you gonna, you know, kick yourself for not finishing? Oh yes. Like she said, when Michelangelo would, you know, look at the Sistine Chapel, he didn't look at the entire, you know, roof and go, Oh my god, I can't believe I have to do this whole thing. He would take this little much and he'd be like, Okay, today I'm gonna do this. So today, write a paragraph. She said, and then if you don't want to release it, then you don't have to release it. But finish it.

[0:36] KITT SHAPIRO: Oh yes. What is your name? I'm KITT SHAPIRO, the author of EARTHA and Kitt: A Daughter’s Love Story in Black and White.

[0:44] Indira G. Wilson: We were awaiting you. And you're listening to the Afro-Existential Podcast on the Broadway Podcast Network.

[0:52] Blaine Teamer: And you will remain with us until we are sure that we can proclaim it to the entire world. You know what? I might have peaked then, so let's maybe we should quit while we're ahead.

[1:00] KITT SHAPIRO: I cannot do it without you.

[1:02] Indira G. Wilson: Welcome to the Afro-Existential Podcast, a podcast and audio play in one. I am one of your hosts, Indira G. Wilson.

[1:10] Blaine Teamer: And I'm Blaine Teamer. They're a wild lot, they say. This season we'll be presenting a brand new audio play entitled Pandora's Trunk and a new interview series entitled The Breakthrough from Vision to Fruition.

[1:21] Indira G. Wilson: In this series, we hear from people who took a great idea and made it a reality. We want to know how they did it and how they got over the obstacles along the way. We hope that it helps and inspires you to make your great idea a reality.

[1:35] Blaine Teamer: But before we go to commercial, here is a sneak peek of our next audio play, Pandora's Trunk. Pandora Washington is on a quest to find her birth mother. In this scene, she meets Sister Rosemary, who tries to explain to Pandora how she was seduced by the new minister of the First and Last Most Faithful Harvest and Grains of Evan Happy Church.

[1:59] Sister Rosemary: We shall begin now. Matthew 15:11 says, it's not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but what comes out of the mouth. This defiles a person. Matthew 15:11.

[2:16] Sister Rosemary: That what it do say. He ain't lying. He ain't lied because that's what it does say. Then Pandora, girlfriend.

[2:28] Sister Rosemary: He wanted me to taste his fruit. He wanted me to taste his fruit. Let me say it one more time. He wanted me to taste his fruit. And it was a strange fruit. Oh, was it a mango or a tangelo? Were it like no mango or no tangelo? As far as I know.

[2:54] Sister Rosemary: Lo! I did go. I said it was a strange fruit. And I like it. Was it like a kumquat or a papaya? Or a persimmon? And what? Like a kumquat? Was it not? And I would be a liar when I said it was like a light. And can I get an amen? If it weren't like no persimmon, can I tell you one more game? The kind of fruit you wanna have at night. In the afternoon as a flag! Yes go!

[3:45] Blaine Teamer: And we'll be right back after a brief commercial break.

[3:51] Alistair Justin Black: Hello, it's Alistair Justin Black from Theatre in the Black. I just finished reading the audacious and hilarious novel entitled Shady by Blaine Teamer. And I'm trying to decide now where to place it in my vast collection of books. You see, it has deception and psychological tension and all the evil of a classic thriller. It's part Walter Mosley and part Agatha Christie mystery novel. But in Shady, who done it is more like a who done did it now. Spinning a tale of deceit, sex, humor, and race, Teamer brings us the story of a southern town called Shady, where evil is not easier to get rid of. Go today, Amazon, or wherever you order books online and get Shady.

[4:48] Blaine Teamer: Ladies and gentlemen, as you know, we are not allowed to bring our animals here to England, quite understandably so. So my friends gave me birds, two doves and a budgie. And I was allowed to have a bird cage built in my dressing room. And whenever anyone came into the dressing room, they would say, Oh, birds in a cage. As a joke, I would say, no, they are not birds in a cage. They are my discarded men. The joke became so popular, we wrote a song around it.

[5:41] Blaine Teamer: I'd like to tell a little story that's been told time and time again about the crazy men who chased me.

[5:57] Indira G. Wilson: We've been listening to the incomparable EARTHA Kitt singing "My Discarded Men" from the album EARTHA Kitt Live in London. Eartha Kitt was an international star who gave new meaning to the word versatile. She was born EARTHA Kitt on January 17th, 1927 in South Carolina on a cotton plantation. Fourteen years later, EARTHA Kitt began her career as a featured dancer and vocalist with the famed Catherine Dunham dance troupe. And before the age of 20, toured worldwide with the company. Over the next 65 years, Miss Kitt distinguished herself in film, theater, cabaret, music, and on television.

[6:39] Indira G. Wilson: Oh, yes. Her daughter KITT SHAPIRO has written a heartfelt memoir entitled EARTHA and Kitt: A Daughter’s Love Story in Black and White. It's a luminous and inspiring portrait of a Black pioneer and artistic force, and one of the most moving mother-daughter stories in Hollywood history. That's exactly what I mean. In part one of our two-part interview, we have the opportunity to talk with KITT SHAPIRO about her mother EARTHA Kitt, her new book, her most recent breakthrough, and why she decided to write the memoir now.

[7:13] KITT SHAPIRO: A book was never really part of the big picture. And then one day on social media, somebody said to me, You can't possibly be EARTHA's biological child. She clearly adopted you. She lied to you your entire life because you know you don't look anything like her. Something like that wouldn't usually get my goat, but it for whatever reason it did. And I thought, A, what a horrible thing to say. B, because I don't look like what you think I should look like, I can't be who I am. And C, and what planet do you think a Black woman could have adopted a white baby in 1961? I mean, come on, let's be real. And then it happened once or twice again, where people were, you know, were saying that's not her daughter.

Her kid daughter doesn't look like that. I started that, okay. You know, I need to talk about who my mother was off the stage, who she was as a mother, who she was as a human being. And instead of shying away from it, which I had often done, I'm not really comfortable stepping into this place, you know, and sort of becoming more outspoken. And then I felt, okay, I can't avoid it anymore. I gotta say stuff.

[8:21] Indira G. Wilson: That's so interesting that you say that because you don't come across as a wallflower. So, how did that work with you and your mother both having these kind of very dynamic personalities?

[8:30] KITT SHAPIRO: Yeah. Well, it actually worked well when she would be off the stage or out of the, you know, off a camera or out of the limelight. She was really much much quieter and wasn't as big a personality. And so that's where my personality actually came in. You know, I worked with my mother right up until her death for EARTHA Kitt Productions. I represented her, and we worked in tandem. And you talk about not being a wallflower. I remember her musical director, Darrell Waters, once I said to him, something happened, and I said to him, you know, I'm just a delicate flower. And he said to me, sweetheart, you're a cactus if I ever met one. And you're like, me? I'm like, okay, I kind of like cactus flower, so I'm okay with that.

[9:15] Indira G. Wilson: Yeah, to say this was one of the sweetest love stories I've ever read. You find often with people who are celebrities and their children don't get to become these expressive people. You know, they're kind of fighting inclined to have their own voice the whole time. How did that work that she allowed you to be yourself in these private situations?

[9:34] KITT SHAPIRO: She felt I was always going to have her back. I would always be her advocate. I would say this to her I was put on this earth to be her daughter. I was a really good fit for her. Now I also want to say it was also a very typical mother-daughter relationship. And there were many times as a teenager where I would roll my eyes at her just like my children rolled their eyes at me. I talk about it is a love story. But it was a very real place too. I mean, you know, we were mother and daughter.

[10:01] Indira G. Wilson: Yeah, it feels very real.

[10:03] KITT SHAPIRO: It feels very real for you to say she was as stern and had high expectations for you as much as she was loving and supportive. My mother was quite the disciplinarian and she commanded and demanded respect and good behavior. But I also like you just said I also had the other side where she was so incredibly loving and affectionate towards me that it didn't feel, you know, frightening. Like I wasn't afraid of her. I was respectful of her, and I wouldn't have. I mean, you know, she died. I was 48 years old, and you know, I still wouldn't, you know, curse in front of her. So you know it was yeah, I you know, who you were dealing with, you know, yeah, like people will say, read the room. I would read the room, you know, you know, right.

[10:49] Indira G. Wilson: Yes, you're literally like, excuse, excuse my French.

[10:52] KITT SHAPIRO: Yeah. Um so kind. But damn it. Excuse my French.

[10:59] Indira G. Wilson: Right, right.

[11:00] KITT SHAPIRO: Yeah, no, I'm not sure. And the funny thing was, you know, my mother, my mother was not one who cursed very much either, but when she did, she cursed in French because she thought it was much, it sounded much it does sound better. She was really ahead of her time as it related to her parenting skills.

[11:16] Indira G. Wilson: It's so true. So I think she really understood from a parenting perspective how much children really are watching you.

[11:22] KITT SHAPIRO: She knew that if you come from a place of love, that you will all you can't really go wrong from you know, there. And that's where I think that she excelled and that she stuck to that. She always followed her heart. And when it came to parenting me, she really followed her gut and she followed her heart. And she would say to me, "You can never love a child too much." And you know what? She was right. Yeah, in photographs, you can see it in her face, how much joy you brought her. I thought what was great about the book is that we don't get to hear that many stories of women of color, mother-daughter. And I thought, well, this is like a great Mother's Day book that every daughter should buy, or every mother should buy for the daughter to say this is how you should be treating me, right?

This is what we could have. If you would only step up, yeah, you know, that right. We could have this going on. This is a bad thing. But I do think that it's more common than not. You know, I think it speaks a lot to the story type of storytelling we've been able to even share. I think black women are often very close to their children in an intimate type of a way. And but they have a very different type of sympathetical relationship with their daughters. I think they're pressed often to make sure they're ready for a very tough world. You know, so you do have to be very upfront, stern and truthful to really prepare a black daughter for a certain type of a world. And this is such a lovely depiction of it.

I look at this book, and you both have said, you know, this is not an it's unique, but it's really not as not so unique. And I think that that's one thing that I love about sharing this book and sharing who my mother was, is that you know, so many people can relate to that, what it feels like to feel about that other person that same way, or have somebody feel about them. And that is why I love having this work out there and having who my mother really was as a human being, be you know, learned more and shared. And there was a lesson that my mother taught me from at a very, very little age when we were in Los Angeles, we had a vegetable garden in Beverly Hills, California, because she believed in growing your own vegetables and planting and putting your hands in the dirt.

She was like, "They're not making any more dirt. Don't give me diamonds, don't give me furs, but you know, if you want to give me something, give me land." And so we had this vegetable garden. And, you know, as a little girl, you know, my mother's in the garden and she's tending to the vegetables, and we had collard greens and kale and you know, all the things in okra and all the things that she had, you know, remembers from the south. But I was sitting there and I remembered seeing us these slugs, you know, there's snails and slugs in the garden. And I went, "Oh, a slug is so gross, you gotta kill it. It's like yucky." And she looked at me and she said, "Why would I kill it? It has every right to be here, just like you do.

You don't have a right to kill it just because you don't like the way it looks." What that says to a little girl to respect everything and everything. These lessons that she had so was so brilliant and so capable of transcribing it, you know, verbally, uh emotionally, you know, were just gifts, were pearls, we're blessings. She was an amazing teacher, but she also really had this thirst for knowledge. I write about this in the book. You my mother wanted to meet ALBERT Einstein. He was teaching at Princeton at the time, and she was already a famous person. And what somebody at William Morris agency said, you know, "Why would he ever want to talk to you?" And she's like, "Uh, I don't know, why don't you ask him?

No, ask. You don't know until you ask." Of course, it turns out that you know, he met her and sat for hours in his office at Princeton and talked because my mother, she wasn't just gonna, she wasn't sitting there talking about music. She was talking if she wanted to really find out what he was thinking. And she was like a sponge. She wanted to learn about so many different things. What what what did it what is it that you have in you that sort of sees right through that? That like if the only person that like that can put limitations on me is me. But I'm sure there were plenty of people in the way saying, "No, no, she's not gonna. We you know, we can't have a black woman for Catwoman. That seems will be ridiculous."

But she pushed beyond those. Even the fact of being a woman in her 80s performing live, you know, you would even think nobody wants to see a woman in her 80s. But I mean, I know I was clamoring for a ticket at the Audubon Borough, you know, I wanted to go. But just this perception of oneself that that you make an impact like just by being present. You know, we referenced her being cast as Catwoman, you know, in 1966 and 67. Think about this woman of color wearing this sexy outfit. You couldn't see anything, but it boy, it was it was, you know, every curve you could see, and she had this sexual tension relationship with the white male lead. I mean, that was a huge step. And everybody who who who signed on to that, from the producers to the network to my mother to, you know, the other actors who took that risk was pretty impressive.

And you know, I don't think people really talk about that quite enough. They think about her as being this feline and she was so perfect as Catwoman. But we don't, we don't really think back. Diane Carroll was really the only other woman when she did Julia, you know, who was really a woman of color not playing a maid. And you know, Catwoman was a villain, but she was always strong, and she didn't compromise who she was for any man. There was a lot about this, this character played by my mother, who was really strong and stood up to the man, you know, and and a white man. I really think there's that was a pretty incredible and forward-thinking move that they all made. I'm not sure anybody really paid, you know, thought it was gonna be that big a, you know, as an impact, but it really was very impactful, certainly on me.

Absolutely. I mean, she did some extraordinary things for the time. Whoever was telling her no, like the gatekeepers that were saying, like, "No, you can't do that," it didn't make a difference because she still did it. She's dancing with the Catherine Dunham dance company. They're in Paris. Yeah, and she has an opportunity to have another job. So here she was presenting, you know, Miss Dunham with this opportunity to work on her day off. This was not in conflict with her with the, you know, with her responsibilities with the dance troupe. It was a day off, and she was gonna take her own time and her own money and do her own thing. And Miss Dunham said, you know, "No, you can't," and my mother didn't think that was fair.

And it wasn't that she was fearless, because I think she was probably terrified. I don't think it had anything to do with, you know, her ability, I'm gonna do this. I think it was just it was like, "No, why wouldn't you? Why wouldn't you let me do that? Well, then I'm gonna go do it anyway." So that's where I think my mother excelled. And I and again, I it has to be something she was just born with. It has to be on some level genetic, that she was able to hold on to a certain amount of strength, and she was able to just follow her gut. And she said, you know, "It doesn't work for me. It's not you're what you're saying isn't fair and it isn't and it isn't right. So I'm gonna follow my heart, you know, where I find that I'm gonna be, you know, able to find that balance."

Yeah, so then then she did. Yeah, I don't have a show yet, but I'm going in this direction. I don't have a show, I don't have any money, I don't know anybody. Yeah, I wouldn't do it right now. I wouldn't I would finish on out with Catherine and then go back. That's what I go back. Yeah, all right, yeah. Can't and I think what happened to her after she left the Dunham group was sort of the beginning of where she where she found that that ability to look at herself, acknowledgement that she had a talent, this believing in herself. Because I think when she took that risk to leave the Dunham troupe, and she agreed to do this cabaret act, and she did, as you just said, she didn't have an act, she hadn't she'd never performed, she'd never been a big singer on a stage before.

But somehow she just was like, "Okay, well, I gotta figure something out, right?" It's you survival instincts will take hold, and you sort of figure it out. And when you're willing to sort of go, "Okay, um, well, I can do this, and I know my voice is sort of special, and I like this song." And you know, I think that there was just a lot that just fell into place, and that she was just able to to make it, you know, work through trial and error. Um, because the first time she stood on that stage, she sat, she said she was completely silent. She didn't know what to do. She just, you know, they were the band was playing, and she just was terrified and not sure what to say or what to even sing anymore.

And but then somehow she made that work too. Because if you ever watched her perform later in life, she held on to those moments of silence, you know, which gave her a sense of command on a stage that people were were drawn to, right? I mean, they're you know, they didn't know what to do. This woman's standing up there and she's not saying anything, but she's not backing down either, and they would just be silent as well. So she used these moments where she learned early on were probably based in fear. She learned that somehow that worked for her, right? It worked to this for the character that she had created, this EARTHA Kitt.

[20:15] Blaine Teamer: And we'll be right back after a brief commercial break.

[20:19] Blaine Teamer: If a mime falls on the radio and no one is around to hear it, does the mime make a sound? Does it even matter? Mimes are like podcasters. If a podcaster podcasts and no one subscribes to the podcast, was anyone listening? Does it even matter? No. Because like mimes on the radio, no one cares until they are no longer there. But you can change that. Just one click can make all the difference. You can give a voice to those who have had no voice before. Click subscribe and let them know that you hear them. Let them know that you care. Podcasters are like mimes, and a mime is a terrible thing to waste.

[21:26] Blaine Teamer: Hello again. We are so glad you joined us for another episode of the Afro-Existential Podcast. Please check out part two of our interview with KITT SHAPIRO, author of EARTHA & Kitt: A Daughter’s Love Story in Black and White, on our next episode. And take a moment to visit us at our website, AfroEX Podcast.com for more fun and insightful content. And be sure to visit EarthAKitt.com. Anything else? Please click subscribe. And check us out on Instagram at the Afro EX Theater. Anything else? Email us your comments or questions at AfroEX Podcast at gmail.com. Anything else? And a very special thanks to the brilliant Lachey Tomlison who plays Sister Rosemary in our upcoming audio play, Pandora's Trunk. Again, thank you for joining us. I'm Blaine Teamer. And I'm Indira G. Wilson. And as always, have a great day on purpose. The Afro-Existential Podcast is part of the Broadway Podcast Network.