Ten Years After I Was Born... Lyrics > Sondheim on Sondheim

[STEPHEN SONDHEIM, spoken]
Ten years after I was born, my parents were divorced and my mother got custody of me, and bought a house in Doylestown, Pennsylvania.

I was an only child, and both my parents were working parents. So because I had no sort of childhood companion, and my mother was a celebrity hunter, she knew slightly the Oscar Hammersteins, and they lived about three miles away. So she sort of foisted me on them because they had a son my own age, actually a year younger. Jimmy Hammerstein.

And as a r?sult, Dorothy and Oscar Hammerstein becam? my surrogate parents during my teen years. And that's essentially how I became a songwriter, because I wanted to do what Oscar did. I've often said if he had been a geologist, I probably would have been a geologist.
Last Update: October, 24th 2023