Pull up a chair and tell me your memory.
Why does it matter to you?
I want to hear your story, your point of view.
Tell me what happened to you.
Hi and welcome back to Tell Me What Happened.
A podcast that features folks from all walks of life telling us one true childhood experience
and how that event, that time period, has impacted who they are today.
I'm your host, Jay Rehack, and like you, I've had my share of childhood experiences.
Some of them pleasant, some of them unpleasant, some of them traumatic.
But I'd like to think that everything that's ever happened to me has made me a better person.
Now people who know me assure me that's probably not true, but that's what I'd like to think.
Alright, today I have as my guest, Victoria Oltarsh.
Victoria has had a lifelong career in the arts as a published lyricist, theater teacher, playwriting, and literary teacher,
director of classical children's theater, and rapid fire, think on your feet, improv.
She works in the New York City and New Jersey school system as a teaching artist for arts and ed agencies.
In 2024, she fulfilled a lifelong dream and became a debut book author of The Boy and the Secret of the Stars,
a middle grade space fantasy chapter book.
There'll be a link to that book in the description below.
Welcome to the show, Victoria Oltarsh.
Hi Jay, thank you so much for having me.
I think you have a great idea for your podcast and I listen to a few of them and they're wonderful.
Well, that's very kind of you, Victoria.
I appreciate the fact that you're taking the time to talk with me today.
I'm a big fan of authors and I know that you are one.
I'm looking forward to reading your book.
I haven't read it yet, but we'll get a chance.
And if I ever do see you, I would love to get it signed.
But that's a side story.
Victoria, are you ready to tell your story?
Yes, I am.
Well, listen, I'm going to mute myself because I don't like to interrupt my guests.
I'm looking forward to hearing the story.
And afterwards, after you tell your story, I'm going to be asking you one question and that one question is this.
How do you think the story that you told me, the experience that you had, has impacted who you are as an adult?
So take it away, Victoria.
Well, my story is an interesting one because in a way the setting of New York City is almost like a character in my story.
I was born in Brooklyn to two parents.
My mother was like a model type. She was beautiful.
She was actually was a model, petite, nothing like how I look.
And my father was a distinguished lawyer in a firm with his father and his other brother.
But my father was, he had been to Paris.
He was a little bit of a musician off the beaten track, tennis pro.
And I resonated more with my dad side.
And my grandmother was this very elegant, I would say handsome woman, not a beautiful woman like my mother petite and traditionally American beauty, but she was beautiful to me.
And I liked her taste.
And so I don't know why, but my sister was never there.
It was me that was there.
I guess it just was, it worked out because maybe my parents got to be with the daughter that they more felt comfortable with.
And I got to go to be with my grandparents on the weekend.
So every weekend, my grandfather would take me right across the street.
They lived at 1025 Fifth Avenue.
And the Metropolitan Museum of Art was right there.
And so we'd go to the museum and see these amazing exhibits and then we'd walk down and there was Central Park right there.
And I'd climb on the Alice in Wonderland statue.
And there was this boat house with this little pond.
And people would float these incredible miniature boats that looked real.
And there'd be people doing movie shoots and modeling and there was just very interesting to me and and alive.
And then sometimes we'd go to Broadway shows.
And I remember being eight years old and looking up and saying, I'm going to do this someday.
And then there was this place called Tavern on the Green.
It was in Central Park.
It was a beautiful restaurant and they'd have tango dancers sometimes.
And so it was a very rich, wonderful exposure.
And it was interesting because my the younger brother, they have three sons, the younger brother, Martin, he was 20 years older than I am.
He studied with Lee Strasberg and Marilyn Monroe was in the class, Marlon Brando and Paul Newman and my uncle Martin.
And he'd come home and tell stories and he'd be in a leotard and he'd be singing all these Broadway shows.
And my grandmother was playing the piano and it wasn't like it was just like normal.
And it was something I resonated with.
And then I was about eight years old and my grandmother bought me this Easter bonnet.
It was Easter time.
And you know that famous song, it's like in your Easter bonnet with all the frills upon it, you'll be the grandest lady in the Easter grade.
I mean, I was eight years old walking on Fifth Avenue with all these people and these finery.
And I had an Easter bonnet and a little pocketbook with flowers on it and a blue Easter spring coat and black patent leather shoes.
And I was just so happy.
And when I got home, my mother, who did not like my grandmother, they did not get along, was raging about the fact that why are you getting an Easter bonnet?
You're Jewish.
Jewish people don't have Easter bonnet.
Now, it was like a punch in the stomach because I felt beautiful and amazing and happy.
And then I got shut down.
And that's how it a lot of times was with my grandmother.
And on the side of my mother, I have to say, when I was three years old, my grandmother didn't correctly strap me into my car seat and I was in a car accident and all my teeth went up in my mouth.
And I remember being like four years old and then being pulled down one at a time.
But she didn't do it on purpose.
And she lived in a beautiful environment which shaped me.
I just remember, I think of all the stories that vivid experience of being so happy and then being so sad it was taken away on the same night.
And that's my story.
That is sad to me. I see that little eight-year-old girl in my mind probably walking up Fifth Avenue or down Fifth Avenue, just enjoying the parade aspect.
But then I also just, as you tag this story with the unfortunate car accident that cost you your teeth or whatever, maybe, I'm not trying to analyze it too much, but maybe that is why your mother didn't go along with the grandmother.
I mean, she's implied that anyway.
But still, that poor experience of joy while you're walking down Fifth Avenue, then you get home and get emotionally punched in the stomach, I'll say.
And I can only imagine how they could have gone, I would say, both ways, which is, I'll never do that again, and I'll stay away from theater, I'll stay away from walking down Fifth Avenue.
Or in this instance, grandma's right, mama's wrong.
I mean, just, you know, again, I'm not trying to determine what it was, but let me just ask you, Victoria, how do you think that experience has impacted who you are as an adult?
Well, it did. You got it right on the nose. It really did impact me.
But I grew up in the fifties, in the middle fifties, and I was a hippie when I was a teenager.
And it made me rebellious, but not in an angry way, necessarily, but it made me like, I'm going to do what I feel is right, and no one can stop me.
And what you're saying is wrong.
Like, it made me have a very strong sense of right and wrong and like integrity in that way. And how could it have been wrong?
There was so much love in the way she gave me the bonnet, and the people were so happy and nothing was wrong with it.
And so I learned to, my mother was a very different kind of person. We wound up moving to Long Island and the five towns, and I never resonated with that.
I was always taking trains into the city. And what wound up happening is my grandmother bought me a beautiful Steinway piano.
I became a classical music major growing up. I went to college for it. But then I transitioned into theater.
But that music background helped me communicate as a musician to all the people I had to direct.
And then when I, in the 80s, I met a man who was a studio musician, and I wrote a song for Grover Washington and Junior, and he was a famous sax player.
And the song was selected and I was a lyricist, and I sort of bounced from all the different arts, which was completely my experience as a young girl during that time.
But when I wound up having a baby and a daughter, and then I had another daughter, and in the middle of the night, and you know, when you're nursing a baby, they wake up.
I was holding my little baby and the whole story of the boy in the secret of stars flashed before my eyes, like, pshh.
And I spent from 1981 until last year, right, I just got the chills writing it down.
And it already won an international book award as a top five honor and I've applied to several awards. So hopefully it'll win more.
But I have like 28 five star reviews. And if you go on Amazon and you see the boy in the secret of stars and Victoria Altarsh, and I know it's going to be linked.
If you look, there's some professional reviews from when you sign up for these book reviews for these book awards.
They give you professional reviews just gratis and mine were five star and really well written and I'm just very excited about it.
It was a life destiny and to end the whole thing is the setting of the boy in the secret of the stars is Eli is an eight year old boy who's different than his brother and different than people and they live across the street from the park.
And I described the brown stones and how he loved nature and Earth's mysteries, but it was so hard to see nature in Manhattan.
So he would go to the park and he climbs up on one of those stone sort of like formations that if you go to Central Park, you'll see they're all there and you can climb on them.
And he makes a wish upon a star when the night becomes dusk and he's taken up and that's his adventure of how he finds the secret within himself.
So this thing is is that all that experience of getting taken into the city and hearing the sounds of the trotting carriages with horses and the Alice in Wonderland statue and the boat house is all in the book.
Love it. Love it. Love it. I, I can see it. I mean, I haven't read the book yet to be honest with you, but I will buy it.
But you know Central Park has a magical quality still. And the idea of you capturing that and I think maybe maybe Eli is you, you know, the eight year old, you know, storyteller there and so I'm happy that your grandparents,
you know, you do with that understanding of art and you obviously spent a lifetime. I read your bio of promoting art in one form or another.
The idea of, I mean, I think it took a little bit longer than I think it should have to write the book. I mean, 40 years or whatever 1980s till now.
But, you know, you did it. So that's the important thing. And I look forward to reading it. And it's a great story.
I think powerful in the sense that those types of experiences, I think can trigger an interest hopefully, or a respect for all the different aspects of art and nature.
I mean, you actually, you're right, Central Park has got all that. So that's, that's great.
So I have to just say one last thing, and that's that, you know, the man that was the musician, we broke up, I became a single mom.
I moved back to New York, we lived in Florida. And I worked in the arts, which as you probably know, it's not the easiest thing for a single mother, right, and raise my kids and sent them to college they're not my younger
grandmother now. But the thing is, is that I never lost the dream. I it was something so important to you. And I feel that that was, I had that from all those early experiences, never give up, never give up.
So that's my message.
My audience skews younger, I think I might have told you so I get a lot of young people listening to the podcast and so, but just even as an author, I just have to say, you had an idea, and it took you some years to actualize it, but it was there it stayed with you, you actualized it.
I'm a big fan of actualization, you did it, you know, you taught art, you shared art, you created art. What a wonderful legacy. So thank you so much for coming on the show, Victoria, and telling us your story.
Thank you so much for letting me tell it.
All right. Well, that's our show. I'd like to thank Victoria Oldtarsh again for the story. Like to thank our sponsors.
Sidelining Publishing. So until next time, this is Jay Rehack, asking you all to please stay safe out there and try not to hurt anybody.