Michael Feinstein

Yes.

And then when you became a teenager, can you remember your first crush?

Or maybe Celia was your first crush, or she's really just a friend?

But I don't think in 1961 the concept of being gay was really known among five-year-olds.

At the age of five?

And was that complicated for you?

Terribly.

How did you absorb that it was wrong?

Because 1960s, early 60s, which we're talking about, people didn't talk about these things much, did they?

Or maybe they did, I don't know.

And you sensed that it was, in quotes, bad.

So you were not only a loner, you were a loner who had a secret that was a bad secret.

In my young mind, yes.

And that meant when you were a little bit older, did you therefore not feel able to respond to it?

So when, as a teenager, you may have had

bigger, proper crushes, you couldn't express it?

Your family, you were Jewish.

Were you actively Jewish in the sense of was faith important to your parents and to you as a family?

Only on the big holidays.

I mean, did you have your bar mitzvah and all of that when you went through all that?