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6B ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT/The Charlotte Post Thursday, April 17, 1997 t Y S(uc«tcC^, Witness member goes solo Continued from 5B Heaven” teams him with II D’Extreme. It gets my vote for the next single, Teddy, it’s good to have you back. Lisa Page More Than You’ll Ever Know Michael A. Brooks, producer CGI Records ☆ ☆ ☆ 1/2 Lisa Page has anchored the group Witness for a number of years. It was a matter 'of time before she decided to do a solo recording. This is the time. “More Than You’ll Know” is the recording. Page has a wonderful, room filling voice that’s built for this material. It’s contemporary, sometimes to the point of being r&b. That’s to be expect ed. Producer Michael Brooks was once a member of Commissioned - the best at combining the genres. But the words leave no doubt this is a gospel CD. “No Other God,” “Do It Again” and “Jesus Will See You Through” may soon become standards on gospel radio. This is a job well done, but I hope it doesn’t signal the end of Witness. Rating: ☆☆☆☆☆ Classic; ☆☆☆☆ Excellent; ☆☆☆ Good; ☆☆ Fair; ☆ Why?; No Stars Given - A KITT Eartha Kitt still wows a crowd Continued from SB Kitt still electrifies audiences with her one-of-a-kind per sona, peppering her flirty set with gold-digging songs about champagne, stretch limos and pearls. But in an era when cabaret is mostly musty theater, Kitt’s shows are fresh and vibrant - and increasingly being by embraced by Gen-Xers. “It’s absolutely marvelous,” the former television Catwoman purrs. “Every time I see a younger audience, that makes me feel alive, really.” At New York’s plush Cafe Carlyle recently, she let her heavy gaze fall onto a young man with close-cropped hair and multiple piercings hud dling with his date at a front table. Teasing, she writhed franti cally toward him, shaking her size 6 frame like some sort of possessed belly dancer. But after shimmying suggestively for a few minutes, she finally gave up. “Next time, bring your father,” she purred. The inti mate hall erupted into laugh ter. Kitt is tickled pink by the appearance of fresh, twen tysomething faces. “Young people obviously come because they’ve been told to come by their parents or they know of me as Catwoman or they just saw me in a movie or heard my voice,” she says. “They don’t know what to expect once they see me and they tell me that they become mesmerized. It’s a happy sur prise because then I find the same faces coming back again and again.” Her daughter, Kitt Shapiro, agrees: “I’m amazed at how diverse the group is. To see people in their 20s is amazing. It’s a testament to who she is and what she’s done all these years.” Keeping a high profile in recent years hasn’t hurt atten dance, either. Kitt was a spellbinding walk- on in both the Isaac Mizrahi documentary “Unzipped,” and opposite Rosie O’Donnell in “Harriet the Spy.” She has also made several small-screen appearances on ‘The Naimy,” “New York Undercover” and “Living Single.” “The audience needs to know that you’re still kicking,” Kitt explains. Kicking is Eartha Kitt’s forte. Exposed to grinding poverty as a toddler in Harlem, Kitt escaped to Europe as a hoofer, learning her craft and breaking hearts as a member of the Katherine Dunham Dance Troupe. As her songs attest, Kitt was a Material Girl decades before Madonna was fitted for dia pers. “Give me a frank account,” she slyly sings in one. “How is your bank account?” She stretches out on the piano. ‘You want my heart today, “What does your broker say?” Yet for all her vampy lyrics about extorting chunky jewels and luxurious furs from lovers, this illegitimate child of a half black, half-Native American woman went out and earned hers. But while she was an instant sensation abroad, her career in America has had more high lights - and low lights - than Dennis Rodman’s scalp. Part of the reason is Kitt her self - she’s never been much of a shrinking violet. The city of Boston banned her from singing “I Want to Be Evil” during the 1950s, frightened of her predatory sexuality. In 1968, she famously denounced the Vietnam War in front of Lady Bird Johnson, in a remark that led to a six-year banishment from America. And somewhere in the bow els of the Pentagon, there’s a thick CIA dossier denouncing Kitt as “a sadistic nymphoma niac with a vile tongue.” “In spite of everything, I’m still here,” she says. “And, thank God, I’m still in demand. I consider myself very lucky.” Kitt has been nominated for two Tonys and an Emmy. Her latest critically-acclaimed album, “Back in Business,” netted her a second Grammy nomination. She has penned three autobiographies and has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Plus, she’s the only per former who can get away with rhyming “nincompoop” with “incomepoop.” “That’s the only word that rhymes, as far as I can think of,” she says playfully during a recent chat in her publicist’s Manhattan office. She lives in Westchester, New York, with two miniature poodles. There currently are no men in -her life, apple tart or otherwise. Though she works glamour to the hilt during her shows, when she’s off-duty she’s much more casual: Her face is framed by a turban that sits atop her head and she wears sweat pants and snow boots. Over the years,. Kitt has stood up for causes long before they were deemed chic: AIDS research, the environment, civil rights and homelessness. “Nobody knows the feeling of rejection more than I do,” the 69-year-old grandmother says. “When something is to me very important, then it’s important enough for me to stand up. “I say, ‘If you don’t rock a boat, how can anything be moved?’” But the woman who has made lounge lizard-dom cool again says she mourns the loss of civility in show business. “The business has gotten very noisy. People don’t listen any more. The singers are singing at you, not to you,” she says with a sigh. “Everythhlg belongs to a corporation. Everyone is now working for Mickey Mouse.” Everyone but the hip-swivel ing Kitt. Afro Center to sponsor Sertima The Afro-American Cultural Center in partnership with BellSouth will present Dr. Ivan Van Sertima for a lecture on Tuesday, April 29. Van Sertima will present his rebut tal of the recent criticism of his highly controversial thesis on the African presence in pre Columbian America. Van Sertima is a professor of African studies at Rutgers University. He is a literary critic, a linguist and an anthropologist who is highly respected in all three fields. As a literary critic, he is the author of Caribbean Writers, a collection of critical essays on the Caribbean novel. He is also the author of several major lit erary reviews published in Denmark, India, Britain and the United States. He was honored for his work in this field by being asked by the Nobel Committee of the Swedish Academy to nominate candidates for the Nobel Prize in Literature from 1976-1980. As a historian of world repute, he has been honored by being asked to join the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization’s (UNESCO) International Commission for Rewriting the Scientific and Cultural History of Mankind. As a linguist. Van Sertima has published essays on the dialect of the Sea Islands off the Georgia coast. He is also the compiler of the Swahili Dictionary of Legal Terms, based on his field work in Tanzania, East AfHca, in 1967. He is the author of “They Came Before Columbus: The African Presence in Ancient America,” which was pub lished by Random House in 1977. It is now in its twenty- first printing. It was published in French in 1981 and was awarded the Clarence L. Holte Prize, a bi-annual award WiiiiMPDciE COPYRIGHT 1M7 WINN-DIXIE CHARLOTTE, INC. America's Supermarket* QUANTITY RIGHTS RESERVED PRICES GOOD WEDNESDAY APRIL 16THRU TUESDAY APRIL 22,1997. * Always U.S.D.A. Choice A • Cut 1/8 - inch Trim " rPEWLg, * Aged for Taste & Tenderness \AO W-D Brand U.S.D.A. Choice Whole or Half Boneless Rib Eyes Family Pack Boneless Rib Eye Steaks lb. *4.88 Cut& Wrapped Free! 15off '^*-L 3nack& EvEKYPAr'! Family Pack U.S.D.A. Inspected Bone-In Fryer Breast 48 U.S.D.A. 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