Meet Shari Lewis:
Ventriloquist, Actress and Teacher
Shari as a Girl

Brigid: When you were a girl, what did you like to do by yourself for fun?

Shari: I love to read, and I read very early.

Brigid: What kind of things did your family like to do together?

Shari: My family was not a rich family. My father held down two jobs, my mother, who was a school teacher, also ran summer camps and gave piano lessons. So there wasn't a lot of time to play. I lived in the projects. Everybody worked very hard.

But we were a very close family. We'd do family things like having Friday night dinner with Grandma and all the cousins. I'm very lucky -- there were about forty cousins in my age group. It's a huge family.

And I love my cousins. We are real friends now, and they live all over the country. No matter where I go, I wouldn't dream of not visiting with them. That's the most entertaining thing we did. We didn't have a lot of money. So it was great just getting to see each other.

Brigid: Sounds like being with your family is really important to you.

Shari: Yes! That's what makes being family fun. Doing things and learning things together, learning more about each other. My family is all over the world now. They have really scattered. I have a cousin who was the mayor of Johannesburg, South Africa. I have family in Israel, family all over the country. All over the world.

Brigid: What did you like to do with your friends?

Shari: We used to make a lot of music. I had a friend that played the saxophone, I played the piano, I had friends who played the guitar, and we used to make music together. We would play for dances or in the school auditorium.

My mother was one of the music coordinators for New York City's Board of Education. I started playing the piano very early because we had one. But I never really liked the piano. The piano is not for everybody. When I got to Music and Art High School in New York City (now called La Guardia), they stuck a violin under my neck and I was in musical heaven. So girls should experiment, in my opinion -- try different instruments.

Brigid: How old were you when you started perfoming with your friends?

Shari: About eleven or twelve. It was old enough so I could take a bus where I had to go alone.

Brigid: When did you decide what you wanted to be when you grew up? What helped you make that decision?

Shari: When I was eleven, my father walked by a closet and he heard my sister screaming to get out of the closet. And he opened the closet door and my sister wasn't in the closet. And so, he recognized that I was doing ventriloquism. And he was thrilled. And that's it exactly, my father was the official magician's magician for the city of New York, and we always had ventriloquists and puppeteers in the house and I saw it.

Rachel: Who were your heroes or role models when you were a girl?

Shari: I really thought I was going to be a ballet dancer. I got out of Music and Arts when I was fifteen, and that year I danced with a Lucia Chase ballet company. My father kept chasing after me to stay with the puppets. He said, "If you become a ballet dancer, by the time you're thirty you'll be old. But if you stay with the puppets, you'll be able to do it all your life." Boy, was Daddy right!

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