In the late 1960s, a young couple from Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, longed for a daughter. The wife was told she needed to have a hysterectomy, and wouldn’t be able to conceive again. They put their names on adoption waiting lists.
She went to the hospital for surgery—and came home with a baby, a tiny blonde-haired, green-eyed girl, given up by a young unmarried flight attendant.
Today that girl—still tiny, at 4 feet 11—is the award-winning singer and actress Kristin Chenoweth. Kristin always wanted to thank the woman who gave her life, but it was a closed adoption. Would she ever get the chance?
At 23, Kristin was the reigning Miss Oklahoma City University. After an event in Tulsa, her pageant handler sat her at a table to sign autographs, mostly for little aspiring beauty queens. Who else knew who she was?
“I’ve been watching your career,” she heard a woman say. There was something about that voice. Kristin looked up to see a small blonde woman with luminous green eyes.
“Well, thank you so much,” Kristin said.
“I just wanted to say…I’m so proud of you,” the woman said, eyes welling with tears. She bit her lip and thrust a wrinkled program forward, unable to say more. Kristin signed it, and the woman vanished into the crowd.
It was so odd, the display of emotion. The pageant handler gripped Kristin’s arm. “That woman—she looked exactly like you.” She did, Kristin realized. She bolted from behind the table, but the woman was lost in the throng.
“I’ll never know for sure,” Kristin says in her memoir. “But if that really was the flight attendant…it makes me happy to think that she knows about the blessings that have rained down on this life she knitted.”
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