Chapter One


The DF Starter Kit (No Assembly Required!)

1. It helps considerably if your parents are musicians of some sort My mother, for instance, was an accomplished pianist who attended the High School of Music and Art before settling into the far more glamorous fields of parenting and psychiatry. In addition to her assigned roles as therapist, domestic slave, and mother to three savage monkeys (i.e. me, my twin brother, Mike, and our older brother, Dave) she played piano on a black upright Yamaha. Owing to the size of our home, the piano was located in what we savage monkeys thought of as the TV Room. This created a conflicting agenda, which in many ways crystallizes the generational dichotomy in our household: Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 24 in C minor versus The Facts of Life.

We barged in on her constantly, resentful of the attention she lavished on the instrument, and the serenity it seemed to grant her. Our father eventually affixed a latch to the door. Thus, the emblematic sound of our youth--a soft cascade of notes interrupted by ferocious pounding, then a muted sigh. Mom played beautifully.

Our father sang, starting in high school and later with the Harvard Glee Club, a distinction we looked upon with the contempt to be expected of insecure male offspring. (Glee Club? Why not just announce you're in the Gay Club?) He performed Lieder mostly, accompanied by our mother. Our father with his chin tipped slightly up, mournful German couplets trembling from his chest. His throat swelling with imploration. Such vulnerability! We were mortified.

Our folks were too stuffed full of intellectual ambitions for a life in the arts. They were the descendants of European Jewry, culture...