Page 556 - WhyAsInY

Why (as in yaverbaum)
that Dan and his friends were making too much noise playing basketball on the court that we had set up at the end of the driveway.
There is no doubt that going through the teenage years with the kids had its bumps, all very minor, but we really enjoyed those times, and the children, for their ages, were actually extremely well behaved, at least that’s what we thought. We now know, and then suspected, that the couches from my apartment, which we had put in the basement, had their own share of adventures, as did, to a lesser extent, the room at the top of the backstairs. Even if we did know, I think that we would have looked the other way as long as the kids did not directly confront us with their escapades.
The fact is that our home was a magnet for the kids and their friends throughout their high school years and thereafter. There are, we are told, a number of reasons for that phenomenon. I suppose that the pri- mary one was that, when we were home from our offices, we loved having the kids around, and they knew it. (Another, perhaps more important, reason is the fact the we were both away from the home, working during the week, and our housekeepers were far from skilled in supervising.) Whether it was Peter with friends Mike Behar, Eric Flisser, Joe Kaiser (who later sang lead tenor roles at the Met but was somehow a baritone in the barbershop quartet in which Peter sang bass in The Music Man), Evan Thayer, Jessie Tenenbaum, Christie Ball, or Rebecca Perkins; Dan with John Pagoda, Jamie Driver, Rich Amder, Mike Buck, Seth Saidman, or Andrew Sorkin (now Andrew Ross Sorkin, a financial columnist for the Times); Rachel with Donna Osmun, Danny Katz, or a number of her other friends from Schechter, the high school, or Scars- dale Summer Music Theatre; David with Brian Savelson, Evan Whiteman, Rebecca Perkins, Eileen Alexander, Dannie Goldman (with whom David had convinced us to let him camp in her backyard in a tent one night), George Samuel, or Taka Hino; or even Danny Y. with Emmet Witchel, Steve Glazer, Cyrus Kholdani, or Yahlin Chang—we got a real kick out of them.
Anyway, I’d like to think that they didn’t come over just because we had put in a pool, a TV with a very large screen, a cool sound system,
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