Send us a text

In this series, we’ve spent time with giants—singers, songwriters, bands, entire movements. Some of them changed my life from a distance, through vinyl and radio and the accidental sacrament of a TV set in the living room.

Today’s subject changed my life at arm’s length.
Not in a stadium, not in a Broadway theater, not on a movie screen, but in a small brick house in Richmond, Virginia—the Edgar Allan Poe Museum—where a visiting diva looked across a desk and aimed one very sharp line straight at a truth I was not ready to say out loud.

Today we’re talking about Bette Midler—The Divine Miss M. Her unlikely beginnings in Hawaii, her nights in the New York bathhouses, her Broadway stints and Hollywood turns, her persona that seems to mix stand-up comic, torch singer, drag queen, Jewish mother, and Vegas showgirl… and that one five-minute encounter that told me more about myself than any song ever had.

Let’s start far from Broadway, far from Manhattan clubs and Hollywood sound stages.

Bette Davis Midler w she studied drama for a while at the university of Hawaii at Manoa and even worked as an extra and the 1966 film Hawaii showing up very briefly as a seasick passenger not exactly a star making moment         as born on December 1, 1945, in Honolulu, Hawaii—the third of four children in a working-class Jewish family in a mostly Asian neighborhood. Her mother, Ruth, was a seamstress and housewife; her father, Fred, worked as a painter at a Navy base and did house painting on the side. 

Support the show

Thank you for experiencing Celebrate Creativity.