Daily Inspiration Quote by Millicent Martin

“Terrible” lands here as a grin you can hear. Millicent Martin isn’t confessing to cruelty so much as reclaiming the delicious charge that clings to performers who refused to be nice, quiet, or easily categorized. Put Charles Pierce (a razor-sharp female impersonator), Bea Arthur (a towering, deadpan comic force), and Martin (a satirical singer-actress with impeccable timing) in one cluster, and “trio” stops sounding like variety-show harmony and starts sounding like a precision tool for puncturing polite culture.

The intent is affectionate mythmaking: she’s sketching a backstage ecology where talent is inseparable from mischief. “Little” is the tell. It plays against the bigness of those personalities, shrinking them into a conspiratorial unit - not stars, but co-conspirators. The subtext: they were trouble for the right people. In mid-century entertainment, “terrible” was often code for queer-coded, too smart, too biting, too unwilling to flatter the room. It’s a label that institutions used to police tone; Martin flips it into a badge.

Context matters because all three figures orbit the cabaret/satire pipeline that fed stage and TV but rarely got credited for changing them. Their comedy wasn’t just jokes; it was stance - amused, unsentimental, alert to hypocrisy. Calling themselves a “terrible little trio” is Martin winking at the audience and honoring a specific kind of camaraderie: the bond between artists who survive by sharpening each other, then aiming that sharpness outward.