Articles by Lara Downes

But Beautiful: My Life with Billie Holiday

by Lara Downes
September 24, 2015

Every Saturday morning, when I was a little girl, my sisters and I went to the San Francisco Conservatory of Music for what we called “Saturday Classes": piano lessons, theory, music history--serious classical music training for serious little musicians. Saturday afternoons, when we got home, we had a ritual. We'd get out our “dress-up" from the vintage steamer trunk that housed a collection of my mother's 1960's party dresses and my grandmother's furs, go through my parents' record collection--the Beatles, ...