Daniel Okrent

And one of the things that's very important to know about Sondheim that enabled him to bring them out

in his songs, those feelings, were the disinhibiting effects of alcohol and drugs.

And alcohol particularly was something that he consumed in great quantities.

His collaborators said, you know, it didn't impair his ability to work, but he would drink all day long.

Marijuana, cocaine for a period, but mostly alcohol, great, great quantities of alcohol.

The cabaret performer Michael Feinstein reported about having his assistant call Sondheim when Sondheim was coming to dinner at Feinstein's house and asked if there was anything particularly that he would like at dinner.

And Sondheim replied, according to Feinstein, vodka, vodka, and more vodka.

And there are dozens of other incidents and moments where the alcohol is so visibly a tool that he uses to make it through his work and I think through his life.

In the late 1970s, his mother, known as Foxy, that was her nickname, wrote him a letter, the content of which he revealed in an interview with the New York Times in 1994, in which he said, in the letter, my mother said, the only thing I regret in life is giving birth to you.

Now, that's a kind of a powerful statement.

And that kind of explains the, or at least measures the intensity of his negative feelings about his mother.

And it's a story that he, from that point, told over and over and over again.

All the Sondheads, as we sometimes are known as those people who really

know everything about him or want to know everything about him.

We all know this letter.

He referred to it so frequently.

I found, however, in the Mary Rogers papers, Mary Rogers was his lifelong friend, daughter of Richard Rogers.

He sent her what he said was a copy of the letter he had written to his mother about

when he received that.

And so the letter in which he says, I never want to have anything to do with you again.