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“I’ll have to ask Rosie,” Dad said.

Although my father was a typical Lebanese head-of-the-tribe kind of husband, my mother ran the house. It was her joy, her pride, her career. So no decision about the house was ever made without her approval. She said no.

“I don’t want those shanties ruining my house,” she said. (I told you she was tough.)

When I first brought home my very Irish boyfriend, Phil Donahue, that was all I could think about. But Phil understood. His grandmother referred to the Italians as the “Hytalians,” and his mother said they “used the church but didn’t support it.” We both had maternal hills to climb.

My mother loved to sing, as did her mother and three sisters. Together they would perform at church, synagogues, Elks Clubs or any place that would have them. At 19, Mom had a fifteen-minute radio show called The Sweet Singer of Sweet Songs. That’s where she met my father—he auditioned as her announcer. She once told me that she had urged the producer to choose him because he had “such sad eyes.”

Soon the show was expanded to half an hour, and retitled Sweethearts on Parade. Mom and Dad became sweethearts away from the parade, as well. So when Dad wanted to go to the big city—Chicago—and take his shot at the big-time nightclubs, Mother packed up her things, left Detroit and the radio show behind and followed the love of her life.

But music would always be the other love of her life, and our house was filled with it. From the moment she woke up, music was playing, and it was a big part of the evening whenever she threw a party: Nat Cole or Sammy Cahn would be at the piano, accompanying Frank, Sammy Davis or Sophie Tucker. But no matter who took the stage in our living room, my mother—with the voice of an angel and the guts of a prizefighter—was never afraid to follow any of them. In truth, she relished it.

Mother’s favorite singers were Sinatra and Cole, and their records played nonstop at our house. That is, until Frank left Nancy—then she never played him again. When Nat left Maria, he was gone, too. Sicilians are loyal. Those movies don’t lie.

Mom and Dad outside WMBC, the Detroit radio station where they first met. They had no money, but they sure had style.

If there was an open mike, you can bet Mom would be singing into it. What you see on her face is pure joy.

Mom’s family wasn’t poor like Dad’s. Her father had a small produce company—fruits and vegetables, a couple of trucks—so they never felt the pinch that Dad and his nine siblings felt growing up. Still, her Detroit neighborhood was a bit rough. Sometimes at around 5:00 P.M., if my grandmother (the drummer) had forgotten something for the evening meal, she would send her eldest, my mother, to the market to pick it up. In order to get to the store, Mom would have to pass a bar and a pool hall where there were always a lot of boys in leather jackets with slicked back hair hanging around outside. My mother was a pretty little thing and scared of those boys. So she devised a plan to keep herself safe. As she walked by the tough guys, she’d drag her foot behind her as if it was hanging by a thread. And they never bothered her.

When Terre and I were little girls, Mom would do an impersonation of this for us, dragging her foot around our living room floor. We would roll over laughing. It wasn’t until we grew up that we realized it wasn’t a funny story. It was a sad story of a sad time when girls had to limp just to live in peace.

My mother loved to laugh and to get a laugh. And she couldn’t wait to tell you a joke or something she’d done—even if it didn’t flatter her—as long as it would make you laugh. One of my most lasting memories of her was the morning she was to have an operation. We were sitting on her hospital bed, and I was combing her hair because she didn’t want to “look a mess” when she went into the operating room. Then she told me a joke, wanting to know if I thought it was funny. I did.

“Good,” she said “because I want to tell it when I get in there.”

What a family.