Michael Tilson Thomas

And I spent three or four days with him in Atlanta and Augusta and in Washington, D.C., watching from backstage just what he did.

And it was a great thrill.

Absolutely, because what I realized that he was focused on the exact duration of the perceivable present.

In every particular piece, the stroke of the beat had a certain length.

He wanted the trap drummer to be out in front and the hand drummer to be in the back and the

bass player to be right in the center, and he had an exact idea of how wide in time that stroke of the chunk-chunk would be, and he used it, and it was something very sophisticated, just the kind of thing that composers like Igor Stravinsky thought about a great deal.

It didn't change the way I conducted so much, but it changed the way I could listen to music and imagine how the ictus, the exact moment of the attack in music, could be really artfully crafted to propel the music in different ways.

Right.

That's correct.

I never realized that until just recently I found the old New York Times piece on his funeral, and there were the pictures of Second Avenue closed off totally and this huge parade of people going out to the cemetery in Brooklyn where he was buried.

Oh, I absolutely knew that, especially because I grew up around my grandmother, Bessie Tomaszewski, Boris's wife, who some people say was a greater star than even he.

She was a tremendous actress, a natural talent.

She'd gone on the stage for the first time when she was about 13 and a half years old, and she became a...

huge headline, first as a tragic actress, and then in her mid-40s, she converted her career into being a major comedian.

And she created a number of characters on the stage.

One very famous one, Minka the Dienstbeint, Minka the Housemaid, which was a kind of Yiddish kite Pygmalion story.

And in this play and others, she created

That character that Fanny Bryce and Molly Pecan and even Barbra Streisand are still playing to this day, that kind of wry, wise, Americanized Jewish woman who has lots of personality and lots of mischief behind their enormous wisdom.

Well, lots of things.

I mean, she told me the history of the theater in enormous detail, and she recited scenes from it.