Personal Memories of Tom Lehrer

1967 photograph of Tom Lehrer performing in Copenhagen (published in the booklet for the album The Remains of Tom Lehrer, from the Wikimedia Commons Web page for the Copenhagen photographs, public domain)

This morning I learned about the death of Tom Lehrer through my news feed from THE GUARDIAN. My first encounter had been through one of my fellow secondary school students, who introduced me to one of his albums. After the first track, “Poisoning Pigeons in the Park,” I was hooked! Those irreverent lyrics were a breath of fresh air for me, reinforced by my learning that his “day job” involved teaching mathematics. In spite of the fact that a few of his songs made fun of Harvard University, I did not realize that, when I was an undergraduate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, we were both living in Cambridge. However, it turned out that, during my graduate student days, he was a friend of my landlord’s family.

As a happy coincidence, I was dating my landlord’s daughter from time to time. Her parents were separated, and she lived with her mother. It turned out that Lehrer was a “friend of the family;” so, when he paid a visit to her mother, I received an invitation to join the company. I suppose that the fact that I was a graduate student in Applied Mathematics may have had something to do with the meet-up, but I suspect that my familiarity with his albums had more to do with the invite. Somewhat to my surprise, the conversation went far more smoothly than I would have anticipated. However, what really interested Lehrer was my familiarity with Al Carmines. This was when the latter’s off-Broadway musical In Circles had become a smash hit. Given that the source of the texts was Gertrude Stein, the success of the musical was quite a surprise to many. As a result, I was as familiar with Carmines’ lyrics as I was with many of Lehrer’s most irreverent songs!

I do not know if Lehrer ever met Carmines; but I do know that Carmines was a very affable person, who probably would have enjoyed the encounter!