Thomas Andrew Lehrer died on July 26, 2025 at age 97. A brilliant satirist and songwriter, he wrote a handful of songs in the 1950s and 60s. His topics – pollution, corporate corruption, hypocrisy, and science – still endure. The recording of his 1967 concert in Copenhagen – just him, his songs, and a piano in front of a polite, young-ish (20s/30s) crowd with a discomfiting penchant for clapping in unison – was one of the more entertaining and intellectually subversive concerts I’ve ever watched.

I say “watched” because Lehrer was done composing and touring by the early 1970s. Every time his concert popped up on PBS, my mother would shout from the den and insist I watch it with her. In later years, she’d telephone and demand I turn on the TV. When I feigned being too busy (or maybe I really was), she’d dismiss me with Ach, you don’t know what you’re missing.

When I finally got around to watching it without the resentment of being told what to do, I was gobsmacked. Here was a clean-shaven, nicely dressed Jew who got away with saying out loud what others secretly thought. He so deftly poked fun at religion, bigotry, politics, and war, it’s like he sliced Society’s throat with an obsidian blade and nobody noticed until they lost too much blood because they were too busy toe-tapping to the melodies and enjoying Lehrer’s wide smile, high cheekbones, and gawky-yet-elegant demeanor. Kinda like a Trojan Horse. That was power, I thought. And it took my breath away.

He had prodigious talent. Not just his lyrics, but his musical gifts. The technical prowess of The Element Song. His replication of ragtime in The Vatican Rag. The military march of Send the Marines. How quickly his fingers flew across the keyboard while he sang and conversed with the audience without missing a note! (Something I never mastered. I even have to look at a keyboard when I type).

Beyond intellectual entertainment, Tom Lehrer gave me a precious gift: a shared experience and vocabulary with my mother. We didn’t agree on much. She frequently made her displeasure known with a sneer and a look and a grunt that said, Are you really planning to wear/think/do THAT? But we could agree on Tom Lehrer.

Mom had a particular fondness for “I Hold Your Hand in Mine.” Every time, she’d laugh herself to tears. Every. Time. She first heard it at Vassar College and found it hysterically, deliciously dark. She’d sing it haltingly, but only because she couldn’t contain her laughter as she neared the punch line. (I didn’t think it was one of his best songs; I preferred “National Brotherhood Week.”).

For a brief, mirthful moment, I could see the young woman she once was. Enjoying her unladylike ideas, expressed through Lehrer’s lyrics. Ideas made all the more rebellious because of Lehrer’s deceptively respectable “packaging” with his crisp suit, his easy banter, and his piano. (The piano is the instrument of Mozart and Beethoven; unlike the electric guitar, which is grungy and defiant). Like Lehrer, she had her own sharp mind (which she kept to herself) and “passed for” Jackie Kennedy-style normal; unlike Lehrer, she ultimately succumbed to the societal pressure of marriage, children, living in suburbia, and envying the Joneses.

Still, while Tom Lehrer sang, she was young and free.

And I got to see that side of her.

Tom Lehrer also gifted the rest of us with the freedom to enjoy – by putting his works in the public domain at Tom Lehrer Songs.

Thank you, Tom Lehrer. May your memory be for a blessing.