Goodbye, dear Beverly Sills (Mom’s only competition)
Published as a Dailykos diary, 02 July 2007 Beverly Sills, opera maven, died yesterday at age 78. I loved her voice, her stage presence — and I loved telling people that my mother could have given Beverly a run for her money. ** I was lucky to have grown up in a home where music, particularly classical music, was valued. Starting at age 7, I took piano lessons and became proficient enough that at age 12, I was asked to be the accompanist for Junior Sunday School and Primary in my Mormon congregation. While I was learning to play the piano, my mother was taking voice lessons. A naturally-gifted singer who had been a soloist as a teenager in her (Lutheran) church choir, she had largely put her gift on the shelf following her marriage and her and my father's conversion to Mormonism when I was a baby. (My mother always said that there were two things she missed about being a Lutheran: the wine and good church music.) When I was in kindergarten — by now having moved from Long Island to ...