MY TESTIMONY- or, What's a nice Jewish girl like you doing in a religion like this?
Chapter 1- My Father's Death Changes Everything
My Father died on April 22, 1961. I was 7 years old. It was an unexpected massive coronary (heart attack) that killed him. So much of that day is permanently etched in my brain- how I had gotten up early to eat breakfast with him, how I had watched his car disappear around the corner not knowing it would be the last time I would see him. Later on in the morning, I began to feel sick with a fever. My Mom answered the phone while I was sitting at the kitchen table and I distinctly remember her face turning almost white. I knew something was wrong. When she got off the phone, she told me my Father was in the hospital and she needed to go be with him. I remember asking, "Will he die?" and she said, "No!" A neighbor and good friend of my Mom's went with her to the hospital and her husband and kids came over to our house to wait with us. I felt sicker and I remember the husband made me drink a cup of tea, which I hated and I just wanted my parents to come home. The next thing I remember, my Mom was waking my sister and I in the early morning and her eyelids were very swollen. "Daddy is dead", I remember her saying and we all piled into her bed together and cried. I didn't know what it meant but I knew it was bad. My Mom didn't talk with us about his death after that initial cry, we didn't attend the funeral, and I was left to my own resources which, as you can imagine, were not well-developed! Over the next few weeks, it became apparent to me that Daddy was never coming home. I cried out to a God I had never prayed to before. My prayer was that He return my Father and if nothing else, that He help my family which I feared was not going to make it through this crisis. I also recited the 23rd Psalm and I cannot for the life of me remember where I had learned that since my parents were avowed atheists. It was probably something we were still reciting in school in those days. My childish memory tells me that my Dad and I were very close- I remember running to hug him when he came home from work each day, I remember sitting on his lap after dinner, I remember sitting with him at the piano. We loved to hear each other play. He was my teacher and wrote penciled notes in my piano books. I remember erasing all of his notes to me after he had died. As his fatherly presence was erased from my life, so I re-enacted that erasure in my piano books. The death of my father so shaped all that was to come in my life for his death created in me such a strong and passionate need to find a replacement father. It would be years and many heartaches before I would find not only a replacement father, but the true eternal and loving father who is the only one who can promise to "never leave or forsake me."
Following my father's death, my Mom, feeling the need to move back to NYC to be closer to relatives, sold our New Jersey home and did just that. If you listen to my song
which is a song about my father's death, you will understand that the second verse talks about the traumatic effect of that move on my life. We moved to a tiny 2-bedroom apartment in Far Rockaway, Queens, and when I stepped into the apartment, I distinctly remember feeling that I had died along with my father. The one constant in my life was the piano and music. My favorite way to pass the time was to lie on the floor listening to Broadway show music- "Gigi", ""My Fair Lady", "Fiorello". I dreamed that I was playing all of my favorite girl parts. I continued piano lessons throughout my childhood and so enjoyed creating at the piano. When I was 9 or 10 I wrote an entire score to the story of "Alice in Wonderland". It was for no one to hear but myself and I was in heaven when I was doing it. I also enjoyed all the attention I got when I played for school talent shows and assemblies. I was always picked to play the "Star Spangled Banner" at school assemblies and afterward, all the teachers and other students would come up and ask me where I learned it. For me it was simple to play what I knew on the piano- I didn't even have to work on it. In fifth grade, my teacher decided to put on "Oklahoma" with our class. I loved "Oklahoma" and knew I wanted to play the lead part of Laurie. When I auditioned, my teacher ran out to tell all the other teachers to come in and hear me. I did get the part. And I got so many parts in shows I was in- I was full of life on the stage, I was a natural. I'm telling you this not to brag but because what happened later is so sad to me even now. Read on....
Chapter 2- Life Gets More Complicated
You all know that strange things happen to children when they turn about 12 years old. Well, I was no exception. Looking back, I believe that losing the dearest man in my life at such an early age led me to be more boy crazy than other girls. It hit me very hard. I had a very intense drive to attract masculine attention. I will tell you that I had no one with which to discuss this who could warn me of the possible pitfalls in believing that a 14-yr.old boy could possibly have anything to offer me that would meet my needs. Instead, I had people pushing me in this direction who thought it was cute. Each summer, I attended a sleep-away camp for 8 weeks in upstate New York. This camp had some wonderful aspects to it, but it was the place where I went totally bonkers with boys because there was a forum for it. When I was as young as 9 years old, there was a male counselor at the camp named Chuck who took a special interest in me which made me so happy. He had a music group at the camp that sang and dressed like the Beatles who were just starting to gain in popularity. Chuck invited me to sing at a talent show with him and his group. I sang "Listen, Do You Want to Know a Secret" and I got to dress like a Beatle. What a thrill, and that propelled me into the popular crowd at camp. This counselor had a little boy in his cabin named Joey Reiman whom I remember played the Artful Dodger in the travelling troupe of "Oliver". Chuck thought Joey and I would make a cute pair and so on the dining room steps every night, he would push us together and we would shyly try to converse. All the male counselors were in on this little game of matchmaker and I saw that it made them happy. At the beginning of the next summer, I had cut my long hair pretty short and I remember worrying that Joey we had something called curfew- a time after the younger campers would go to sleep when the older campers (12 and older) would socialize.