Mad About Whitney - NYTimes.com February 13, 2012, 5:12 pm The announcement Saturday night of the passing of Whitney Houston took me straight back to the first time I heard her sing. It was around 1984 at Sweetwater's, a defunct Manhattan nightclub located on 68th Street and Amsterdam Avenue. My future husband and I went to the club to hear her mother, Cissy, perform, because I was loving a gospel album that she released a few years earlier. But as it turned out, Cissy was using her show as an opportunity to introduce Whitney, who at the time appeared as a backup singer in her mother's show along with her brother Gary. I remember this beautiful, skinny, confident, 21-year-old girl-child coming to the microphone that night and silencing all of us in the middle of our conversations, our drinks, our meals as she "toe up" "I Am Changing," from the Broadway show "Dreamgirls." I wish I could say that I walked out thinking, That child is going to be a star, but as special as I knew her voice to be, I had no inkling of what was to come. The music mogul Clive Davis had better instincts than I. As much as I loved Houston during the successful years of her career, I have to admit that I spent the last decade or so being angry as that young, innocent, supremely talented girl faded from our view. Angry at her for seeming not to treasure the awesome blessing that was her voice; for cheating us out of all those chart-topping albums we had come to expect, albums that would either match or surpass that amazing debut of hers and the best-selling soundtracks from the "The Bodyguard" and "Waiting to Exhale" and "The Preacher's Wife," all of which were in heavy rotation on my personal playlist back then. But this weekend I realized that, in the end, maybe Houston gave exactly what she was supposed to give us. Maybe she left us not just with the wonder of her voice and her music at their peaks, but also with a reminder, a lesson, that our spirits - and our talents - come housed in a body that we alone are the caretakers of for a finite period of time.