I came home from work to the house I shared with my younger brother. He owned the house. It was basically unfurnished, with plain white stucco walls and stained beige carpeting, as befits a double-bachelor pad.

On the trash-picked dining room table sat the hand-me-down phone and answering machine. My brother looked up from his newspaper and said to me: “There’s a really weird message on there for you.”

“Oh, is it Kitten?” I asked, and pressed Play before he could answer.

The voice from the answering machine dragged out every other word, like the ladies did on those 1-900 number commercials back in the ’90s. “Oh, hiiiii, Scott! It’s meeee, Kitten.”

In an exaggerated apologetic tone, she continued: “Oh, geez. I really blew it this time, I think. I missed our phone date!”

My brother interrupted from the other room: “Phone date!?”

She cooed on: “See, my landlord stopped by this morning and wanted to take me for a riiiide!” She inhaled briskly then purred, “In his new car!” With a bad-girl giggle she continued, “But ooooh-oh! You know what? We went too faaaar!” She sighed deeply, and in the most rueful voice imaginable finished with: “Can you ever forgive me, Scott? I hope you can. Call me?”

Then quickly, in a serious, businesslike tone, she repeated, “It’s Kitten.” Click.

My brother was gawking at me with a bewildered look that told me he had comprehended the message even less the second time hearing it.

“Who the hell is that?” He asked in that fed-up-with-your-annoying-roommate tone.

I said, “Okay, remember last month when I went to Quaker Gathering in Illinois?” He nodded. “Well, I met this woman there named Reeny. Her nametag gave her hometown as ‘Hollywood’. So naturally I spent the whole session just talking to her, since I figured we would have a lot in common…”

My brother rolled his eyes. “See, right there! That is something the rest of our family would never say.” He was right. Being back home with them since my Crisis (which is the story I’m building up to tell as the culmination of my writing career) had really dramatized the difference between me and them. They just want to live their lives quietly, I want to be the star of a new show every day.

As I told him the rest of my story — about how after finding out I was a fan, my fellow Hollywood Quaker Reeny had put me in touch with her neighbor Kitten Natividad, long-time common-law wife/muse of cult softcore adult film director Russ Meyer — my brother seemed to tune out and returned his attention to the newspaper.

Kitten and I rescheduled our phone date, and I interviewed her for UsedWigs. What a pair we made, I in my mincey, milquetoasted Dick Cavett-like voice and Kitten in her full-bodied 900-sexline voice.

While we were talking on the phone, she misinterpreted something I said at one point and lashed out defensively with a frantic, hurt anger that surprised me. I patched it over quickly with her, though. We ended the call as friends. She later sent me (at my request, and gratis!) several autographed pictures, including the one you see here (front and back). I used to get email updates from her periodically, but I haven’t talked to her since that day on the cordless phone in the un-air-conditioned back bedroom at my brother’s house.

In the interview Kitten is revealing, funny, and heartily open. But there were a few things she said that I chose not to include. Because there’s a code among us people who put ourselves out there. Even someone like Kitten — who after the Meyer films entered a substance-abuse hell that caused her to have to do harder-core porn like Thanks for the Mammaries, and is now in recovery – you know what? Especially someone like Kitten deserves privacy, and maybe needs someone to watch over her a little. I’m glad she has Friend Reeny, who is a kind soul. And I’m glad I have my brother, who helped me through that rough time in my life with patience and generosity.

Postscript: This will be the last time I make a famous person the subject of one of my stories. It’s unnecessary, and exploitative. I want to get to the point soon where I can spin story gold out of the most ordinary straw, no Hollywood glitter necessary. I want to write about people like you and me from now on.

Tags: Kitten Natividad, Quakerism, Russ Meyer, UsedWigs