Mother's Day, 2026

     This is the first Mother's Day since my mother passed away. In the last few years before she died, I spent a long time talking to her about her life, and began to write about it for an unpublished project.

     "I was a beautiful child," my mother recalled. "My mother entered me in Shirley Temple contests."    

     That she did. A suspiciously large quantity of 8 x 10 studio portraits exist of my mother as a baby and toddler, her blonde hair in fat ringlets. More than even the proudest parent would commission, too large to ship safely to Poland; snapshots tucked into letters are cheaper and more practical. On the back of one, the remnants of a label from a "Beautiful Baby Contest," half scraped off 

     A reminder. We consider the current subhell of influencers, all those 11-year-old girls solemnly unboxing packages of eyebrow sparkle for their budding YouTube channels, as a particularly modern deformation of the once-innocent childhood experience. It's not. In the 1930s, ambitious parents wanted their children to be movie stars. Not just Shirley Temple, the apex, but Deanne Durbin and Mickey Rooney, not to forget Jackie Cooper, Dickie Moore, Darla Hood, and other "Our Gang" stars. Plus countless lesser lights, including local radio personalities in every major city. Feeding this dream were acting classes, dance studios, singing lessons, piano teachers. They even managed to monetize being smart; the "Quiz Kids" radio show began in 1940 and ran for 16 years.  

     My grandmother was a member of the Jewish Singing Society, and my mother took a cue from her.

     "I think that I shall never see, a poem as lovely as a tree," she sang, at 10 years old, the Joyce Kilmer poem set to music, her debut performance, at a Sunday school run by the Jewish Bureau of Education. 

     "I loved to be in front of audience and my passion was to perform," she wrote, years later. She joined the Cain Park Theater and began, by age 13, to enter radio singing contests. Grandpa Irv paid $10 to have a 78 rpm record cut of her competing on a radio competition. "Big Broadcast" written on the label in a careful hand. "March 17, 1950." St. Patrick's Day. 

     Nowadays we record everything and drown in unexamined documentation. But this 78 seems a precious few minutes improbably preserved from the deep past, captured, rescued, scooped out of the torrent of events and set aside in a china teacup outside of time. 

      A blaze of static, then: 

      "Act No. 6. A charming young lady. How old are you? 

      "Thirteen," she says, in a piping baby doll voice. 

      "Thirteen! A great big girl now," the host exudes. "A blonde. She has a brilliant flame red dress on. Her name is June Bramson. Where do you live June? " 

      "3161 East Derbyshire Road." 

      "June is going to sing. Have you ever taken any lessons?" 

      "No," she says, almost pouting. Listening to it, hearing her childish voice, it strikes me: at 13, she'll meet my father in less than five years; marry him in a little more than six, and I'll be born, 10 years and three months after this broadcast.

     "Those are cute gloves," the host says.  "What do you do with those? Make music with them?" 

      There's something almost forward in that question, "What do you do with those?" She doesn't answer. The host pushes on.

      "June, what do you want to sing for us tonight?" 

      "'There's No Tomorrow.'" 

      "That used to be 'O Sole Mio.'" 

      "An Italian song," my future mother agrees. 

     The studio piano plinks to life. "Love is a flowwwwwwer, that blooms so tennnnnnder…" she begins, a throb in her voice, occasionally going a bit flat on "tomorrow." The thick one-sided record was carefully shelved for nearly 75 years, salvaged by me, safely tucked in a record album of Al Jolson 78s — back when albums had pages of sleeves, like a photo album. In 2025, I have it digitized at the library next door and play it for my mother in her assisted living facility in Addison. 

     She sits in her wheelchair, head cocked, listening carefully. The song ends. The studio audience not only claps, but cheers. My mother doesn't share their enthusiasm. 

     "I never won," she says, flatly. "I didn't win. I should have picked a better song. 'Goody Goody' would have been better. Something with more pep." 

     "I never won." That seems very telling. My kind wants so badly to win, it makes not winning burn, and we remember the bad part. The good part — I sang on the radio, I wore a flame red dress, my father paid $10 to record my voice at a time when a quart of milk cost a quarter — doesn't register. Then again, I just pointed out that my 13-year-old mother sang flat. So I'm reporting on a tendency while simultaneously suffering from it. If indeed that is a liability. I like to think of it as candor. When putting the shiniest gloss you can on yourself and everything you do is practically an American folk ailment, pointing out the flaws in life becomes a patriotic duty.