For a couple of years during college, I was the live-in nanny for the family of the executive director of a large symphony orchestra.
In exchange for babysitting eight-year-old Littie a few nights a week, I got free room and board in their home, which to me was downright luxurious. An original Warhol of Chairman Mao kept watch over the formal living room, which was adjacent to a formal dining room that was actually used for formal dining, rather than storage of Christmas ornaments and sewing projects, like almost every other formal dining room I’d ever seen.
Part of the duties of the executive director included entertaining musicians and guest artists. In addition to fabulous symphony tickets, I sometimes had a front row seat to “dinner with famous people.” The symphony’s conductor was a frequent guest, his deadpan humor a striking contrast to his formidable onstage persona. I got inadvertently sweat-bombed by Itzhak Perlman when shaking his hand after a performance, and I watched Sir Neville Marriner—“Sneville,” among these friends—balance a spoon on his nose.
But my favorite dinner guest by far was a soft-spoken cellist. A previous guest in their home, he had remembered that Littie kept a small menagerie of a particularly shaped stuffed polar bear, and he’d very thoughtfully brought one along as a gift. As the nanny, I was sent up the stairs with Littie and our guest while she added the new treasure to her clan of bears. At the door to her room he stopped, smiled, and gestured ‘Ladies first’ with his hand.
While Littie busied herself with introducing the polar bear to his new friends1, the cellist turned to me.
“Hi, I’m Yo-Yo,” he said, shaking my hand.
I hope my response was intelligible.
He asked me about school, what my major was, what I planned to do for the summer… and he was genuinely interested in my replies. His gentle demeanor and thoughtful questioning quickly put me at ease. I was almost sad when Littie finished her bear introductions; I’d been enjoying our conversation.
We had another guest for dinner that evening: pianist Emanuel Ax, aka “Manny.” Both he and Yo-Yo treated me with the same warmth and inclusion as they would any other dinner guest. From their witty banter, it was clear that the two of them were old friends.
At one point, Manny cocked his thumb at me at joked, “Doesn’t she remind you a little of Jimmy Choo2?”
To which Yo-Yo replied, “Nah, Jimmy Choo reminds me a little of her.”
I don’t remember much else about that evening, but whenever I hear Yo-Yo Ma play, I think, “What a lovely human being.”
- Littie’s polar bear collection is alive and well, now much loved by her own child, who is about the same age as she was in this story.
- I had—and still have—no idea whom they were talking about, and it’s unlikely they were referring to the shoe designer. My actual recollection of the name is “Jimmy Chin,” but the currently-famous Jimmy Chin was nowhere near a recognizable name at the time, and it’s possible my memory morphed over time to include a name I knew. As a side note, Jimmy Chin is the subject of another story, in which my late husband enjoyed teasing me for chatting with him at a climbing gym in Boulder—we were the only two Asians in the place, after all—before I had any idea who he was.
