Minnelli’s voice resonates this weekend at MCA Looking for Liza and Mom… One icon wil conjure echoes of another

Nessa Burns Reifsnyder sat in the living room of her grandparents’ home in Millinocket one September night in 1972. She was just 8 – a third-grader – but she would have been allowed to stay up late that night. The lights in the room were turned down low, and the black-and-white TV set cast a glow over the young girl.

That night was the broadcast of “Liza with a Z,” a live concert starring Liza Minnelli at the height of her dancing and acting career. It’s likely that everyone had tuned into the splashy TV show to see Minnelli. By 1972, she was already an entertainment icon. The TV event, directed and choreographed by the legendary Bob Fosse, further proved that she wasn’t merely the child of Judy Garland and director Vincente Minnelli but a mega name in her own right. The movie version of the musical “Cabaret” came out that same year, and Minnelli put her indelible stamp on the show. She hadn’t been in the original Broadway musical, but she owned the movie, for which she and Fosse both won Oscars.

Naturally, “Liza with a Z” was steaming hot – with eight cameras rolling and Minnelli hitting every sexy nuance. Viewers were glued to her signature high kicks, gleaming toothy smile, spiky black hair and jazzy vocals.

Back in Millinocket, the young Reifsnyder was looking beyond Minnelli. There in the background, seated at the onstage piano at the Lyceum Theater in New York City, was her own star: Maryann Arnold, who also happened to be the girl’s mother.

If Reifsnyder was not exactly a full-time stage brat growing up, she remembers this and other Broadway nights with great affection and admiration for her mother. Arnold grew up in Millinocket, graduated from Stearns High School in 1950, and then left for New York City to find work as a jazz pianist. During the 1960s, she was pianist for the onstage, all-female Kit Kat Band in the original Broadway cast of “Cabaret.” (Some nights Reifsnyder went with her mother and stayed with the costume shop workers backstage.) When the show closed after more than 1,100 performances, Arnold went on tour with the show and with Joel Grey for several summers, when Reifsnyder and her brother would go to Maine to visit their grandparents. Eventually, unable to make a living as a pianist, Arnold took an office job to support the two children she was raising alone in Queens.

For “Liza with a Z,” Arnold was asked to make a guest appearance as accompanist to Minnelli on tunes from the show. That happened to be a year when Reifsnyder was living with her grandparents.

“I felt pride, joy, all the things you could possibly imagine when I saw her on TV that night,” said Reifsnyder, who is now 42. [Minnelli is 60.] “Even as a kid I knew this was it – the luster of the show and Liza was so powerfully on and the audience was so classy. It made me miss my mother for sure. She looked very happy. It was very cool.”

Reifsnyder, who lives on Mount Desert Island and is a writer for The Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, was raised in New York City, but loved childhood summers in Maine with her grandparents, mother and brother. “I realized I felt at home in Maine,” said Reifsnyder, whose parents divorced when she was a baby. In 1972, the year of “Liza with a Z,” she asked to stay with her grandparents in Millinocket for the school year instead of returning to Queens. Her mother agreed.

So Reifsnyder never met Minnelli.

But she has no intention of missing the diva a second time – in another live concert 7 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 16, at the gala opening of the season at the Maine Center for the Arts in Orono.

“My children are well aware of Liza,” said Reifsnyder, whose four children – ages 6 to 16 – and husband will accompany her to the show. “When the DVD of ‘Liza with a Z’ came out this year, it was exciting for all of us. When we watched it with my two younger ones – you know how kids make icons out of celebrities – they were saying ‘Liza! Can we watch Liza?'”

Before this year, the last memorable time Reifsnyder saw “Liza with a Z” was with her mother and brother at the Museum of Television and Radio in New York City about 10 years ago. Arnold, who was mentored early on by jazz pianist Marian McPartland, died last year. But Reifsnyder, who moved back to Queens in 1973 and graduated later from Bowdoin College, vividly remembers the days of her mother’s career and the difficult choices the woman made to balance her life as artist and mother.

“She was a solid individual,” Reifsnyder recalled. “There was never any time when her responsibilities slipped. And she raised me to be an independent spirit. We were very close.”

Reifsnyder will be seated somewhere near the front row for Saturday’s concert. Once again, she’ll be watching Minnelli but, undoubtedly, she will be thinking about her mother.

Tickets are still available for the concert by Liza Minnelli, who will perform with her music director and 14-piece orchestra, at 7 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 16, at the Maine Center for the Arts in Orono. For tickets and information, call 581-1755 or visit www.mainecenterforthearts.org.