My mother, Lily, was born in 1911 on a dining room table in the Bronx. She would live through World War I, the Spanish Flu, Women’s Suffrage, the Roaring Twenties, the Stock Market Crash, the Great Depression, and World War II before she was 30. She took her final bow on June 23, 2014 at over 103 years
young. During the more-than-six decades that Lily and I were figuring us out, expectations for women were transformed again and again by the women’s movement, the sexual revolution, and the subsequent mandate for women to “have it all.”
In my career, now in its 50th year, one of the roles I had the good fortune to play, in what I believe to be one of the best musicals ever written, is Rose, in Arthur Laurents, Julie Styne, and Stephen Sondheim’s “Gypsy.”