Karen | Kira Lerner

It was thirty years ago today–July 1, 1986–when I woke up to the doorbell ringing.

7:30ish in the morning, as I recall, on a Tuesday. I was annoyed as hell. I’m a night person, always have been, and no one should be bugging me at that hour. I was 19, six weeks to go until I hit 20. I’d stayed at home that summer, making the astonishingly bad decision to accept my friend’s request to be music director of what was the second worst show I’d ever been involved with.

(And not just because it was the worst summer I had, but seriously, “They’re Playing Our Song” is just an awful show. Still, “The Good Doctor” wins out for a truly execrable lack of anything to recommend it. Interestingly, I only just now realized that they’re both Neil Simon. And I like the guy!)

But anyway, the badness of the decision had nothing to do with the quality of the show. What I should have been doing was traveling with the rest of my family–my sisters, father and mother–to the Bahamas. Their destination was an experimental cancer treatment clinic, in what I was too blinkered and naïve to realize was a last-ditch effort to save my mother’s life. Continue reading “Grief marks an anniversary: One door opens, another shuts” »

Fifty years ago, July 27, 1963, a family was lost.

The Lerner family consisted of a vibrant, playful mother; a confident and charismatic father; a six-year-old girl who was already filled with a love of music and performing for an audience; and a ten-year-old boy—the beloved firstborn son, the bright if sometimes hard-to-teach student, the prankster but loving older brother, the leader of his generation of cousins, the rough-and-tumble athlete.

Pop and Kenny.

The foursome lived in East Meadow, a Long Island town that was home to families who weren’t wealthy but were certainly more comfortable than their parents had been. The mother and father’s parents were all immigrant Jews who had known dire conditions both in American and in their various native Eastern European homes. But the mother and father were 1^st generation Americans, married in 1950 right in the center of the 20^th century, where enough work, talent and hope allegedly guaranteed you a prosperous and gilded future.

The Lerners were on track to fulfill this promise. Home movies from this time show softball games, picnics, the daughter dancing and pirouetting and preening for the camera, the mother smiling with pride and love, the father pulling amusing faces and coaching the various games, the boy running and playing and laughing because he was happy and healthy and likely felt as immortal as most loved, cared-for, and care-free children do. Continue reading “A Family’s Loss” »