Tom Lehrer turning 90 last week brought back more memories of my late father Morris, the subject of the previous post. The two were temperamentally quite distant: Morris’s East European “yekke” earnestness couldn’t really be reconciled with Lehrer’s New York slapstick meta irony. But they were obliquely connected- overlapping both at Harvard and MIT where Lehrer, for years, attempted to complete a math PhD. I remember hearing second hand stories about him and I have vivid memories of the cover of his first record which was on my parents’ shelf long well before I was able to operate our phonograph. When I could, I commandeered it and wore it out-though not before getting banned from my Irish Catholic friends’ houses for imposing on them the Vatican Rag.