Michael Tilson Thomas

You're like me.

You're an adventurer.

You'll have to prove something.

I paid attention to it.

I didn't know quite what it meant.

And as I listened to her tell all these stories of her life from her childhood through her stardom and then even her reflections on the way fashions changed and the way she was in her late life a quite lonely person.

I took it all in, and what I kind of understood from her was that it had been a very interesting ride, that she really was proud of what had been accomplished.

And when she saw somebody, a very successful entertainer coming up, and she could see in them something that had come from the kind of things that they had done in the theater, she was very proud of it.

She recognized them and appreciated them.

There wasn't much music at my grandmother's funeral.

There were a few prayers and there were very few people there.

And her plaque just says, Bessie Tomaszewski, Yiddish theater pioneer star, which is exactly what she wanted it to say.

But of course, there's a whole repertory of songs that we played at home all the time whenever we thought about her and that I still play.

It was a very big moment, a big rite of passage in my life.

The first day that I took over playing her songs instead of my father playing them and measuring the way I was playing them against the wonderful nuances that he and my grandmother had brought to the music.

I was lucky to hear my family play that music for me.

I wanted to keep in my ears exactly the way they had sung the songs and played them with all the irony and mordency and snappy little gestures and comebacks.

My way of expressing what she said to me is, what is it like for people beyond the sixth row?

That we play in such big halls sometimes in classical music and they're halls designed to be very rich, which is on the one hand, very nice.

The