PEOPLE TURNED AWAY FROM KITTY CARLISLE MEMORIAL

The line of people hoping to attend today's public memorial for Kitty Carlisle at the Majestic Theatre stretched all the way into Shubert Alley--and not everyone got inside. It seemed that invitees got priority until the noon starting time, and then the general public was given 10 or 15 minutes to get inside before being shut out, perhaps so that the memorial could get underway. If there were still empty seats in the Majestic (1645 capacity), and the doors had been kept open for only a few minutes more, everyone would have been able to attend.

Anyway, I was touched to see how many people had lined up to attend the ceremony. It's just too bad many of those pictured below (and their photographer) didn't get in.
























Photo: David Marc Fischer

GOODBYE KITTY (1910-2007). Every decade or so I visit the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA). Yesterday I made one of those visits. As I rode the elevator, I thought of Kitty Carlisle Hart, the longtime chair of NYSCA, and wondered how she was doing. Soon afterward, I learned she had died hours earlier. [Clarification: She died on Tuesday, April 17.]

I didn't know Kitty Carlisle myself, but I know people who knew her at NYSCA, where today there was sadness over her recent decline and passing after her decades of service to the arts. Everything I've heard about her indicates that she was very respected and well-liked.

Me, I remember Kitty Carlisle from her performance in the Marx Brothers movie A Night at the Opera, but mainly from her involvement in the game show To Tell the Truth. For decades she mixed with many of the city's arts luminaries--and she apparently claimed to have been courted by George Gershwin (though she married Moss Hart, who wrote Face the Music). She performed a nightclub act into her 90s.

Basically, this lady had one helluva career.

Let's see how she did on this segment of To Tell the Truth.



Source (9:02)