Lenny, as Mom was known, was dating Dad’s best friend Howard Erskine, a Broadway producer who brought her to see his out-of-town run in Hartford of a now forgotten play called Late Love, starring Arlene Francis. Howard and my father knew each other from Williams College and were in the same acting club with Dad’s other best friend Stephen Sondheim, who played opposite him in Clifford Odets’s Waiting for Lefty.
