Michael Tilson Thomas

My mother said, don't ask Cousin Georgie to get you into that show.

It's the hardest ticket to get, and just don't be a monster.

So, of course, when I saw him, I immediately said, could we see My Fair Lady?

We went to the theater.

People were lined up around the block to hopefully get some returns, and he went over to the stage door, knocked, and said, hey, is Izzy around?

And Izzy, company manager, came out, and my cousin...

indicated me and said, hey, Izzy, see this kid?

Boris Tomaszewski's grandson.

Two minutes later, we were in row five, right in the center of that theater.

Bessie started out as a young girl.

She was about five when she arrived into the United States from the Ukraine.

And she met Boris, kind of eloped with him when she was a young teenager and 14, 15 years old.

And she began finding her way in the theater, first playing kind of innocent young girl roles.

But as time went on, she also discovered her enormous abilities as a comedian.

And she very often played trouser parts or parts involving men.

women being disguised as men for particular political or educational social purposes, a little bit like what the story of Yentl is, right?

So Bessie did a lot of plays like that, where a woman disguises herself as a man in order to gain the advantages of education or whatever that a man can have.

Well, she went from being a little girl in a village that was asked to bring in the goats and do other domestic chores to working in a tobacco factory in Baltimore and then suddenly finding herself on stage as...

a star pretty quickly.

But she went beyond that.