THEATER WOW: THE BROADWAY ALBUM

My Mom, The Goddess with the Voice Like Buttah & Me

MY MOM & BARBRA STREISAND

Anytime I’m home, the one thing I know without fail is that is at some point I’m going to hear my mom somewhere in the house singing. My whole life, her voice has been a part of our lives.

I asked her about this the other day. “I don’t ever remember not singing,” she said. “I think I was born singing.”

Her father was a semi-professional singer who loved opera and would get hired to sign at weddings or company events. My mom remembers him singing as he shaved. “He had a beautiful voice.”

Although most of her adult life she’s been singing at weddings, church services, and other events, my mom never saw herself making a career of singing. “I thought about it, but I didn’t think I was qualified,” she told me. “I didn’t have professional training.” For a long while she was anxious about singing in public, too. “When I was little, I remember we were at some kind of gathering. And my father and mother wanted me to sing—I was maybe 4 or 5, 6—and I said I could but only if I had my back to them.”

For all her humility about her talent, as far back as I can remember, people talked about my mom’s voice. They always said the same thing: “Your mom sounds like Barbra Streisand.”

She remembers that starting in her 20s. All her friends would ask her to sing at their weddings, and they all wanted her to sing “Evergreen.” I wondered what that comparison felt like. “I was flattered,” she told me. “Are you kidding me? Barbra Streisand? There is nobody that can do what she can do with music. She sings with her soul.”  

What does that mean, I wondered? “She’s singing from the heart. She puts everything in it, emotionally, physically, spiritually, when she sings. You never hear her sing something that doesn’t have some kind of meaning.” (Which if you ask me is an interesting way of describing Streisand as a performer. And accurate: You may not always like Streisand’s choices, but she’s never phoning it in.)

I realize now, although people were always making that Streisand comparison, I never saw my mom turn that into a reason to pat herself on the back. She says there was a simple reason for that: “I always thought I was really not quite good enough,” even though as I question her further she also admits if she hears a song, she can sing it back pretty much immediately.

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AN ORPHAN, AN ICON, A GAY KID AND HIS MOM’S RECORD COLLECTION