Mimi Lerner's Son And Grandson Featured Humans Of New York

A photography project started in 2010, titled Humans of New York, has grown to 14.6 million followers on Facebook and 3.7 million followers on Instagram. As random people are photographed in the city by Brandon Stanton, a short story or quote accompanies each image. This week features Dan Lerner playing ball with his son Julian. Dan's mother is the late opera singer Mimi Lerner. The mezzo-soprano passed away in 2007 from complications of a heart tumor. See the photos with captions, learn more about HONY, and read details of Mimi Lerner's career, after the jump.

“Second grade is starting on Wednesday. They assign homework in second grade, so I’m a little worried about that. Also the teachers don’t help you as much. They might see that you are spelling a word wrong, and they’ll let you spell it wrong without even telling you. They’re not being mean. They just want to push you. Not actually push you. But push you to spell better. And I’m pretty sure we’re going to be learning about Native Americans. Because I walked by a second grade class last year and everyone was on the floor making Native American stuff out of clay.”

“I spent about ten years as a music agent. Along the way, I became very interested in how my clients handled success. Some of them were tremendously successful but quite unhappy. Others seemed quite content with their success. The subject interested me so much that I went back to school to study the science of happiness, and now I teach the subject at NYU. Happiness doesn’t necessarily mean you have a smile on your face. It’s more of a mixing board with several different dials: positive emotion, engagement, relationships, meaning, and achievement. Everyone’s mixing board is set differently. There’s no one way to be happy and there’s no wrong way to be happy. I may draw my happiness from relationships, while somebody else may need to be constantly engaged in the pursuit of a goal.”

"My name is Brandon and I began Humans of New York in the summer of 2010. I thought it would be really cool to create an exhaustive catalogue of New York City’s inhabitants, so I set out to photograph 10,000 New Yorkers and plot their photos on a map. I worked for several months with this goal in mind, but somewhere along the way, HONY began to take on a much different character. I started collecting quotes and short stories from the people I met, and began including these snippets alongside the photographs. Taken together, these portraits and captions became the subject of a vibrant blog. With over eight million followers on social media, HONY now provides a worldwide audience with daily glimpses into the lives of strangers in New York City. It has also become a #1 NYT bestselling book.. It’s been quite a ride so far. Feel free to follow along." [Source]

"Mimi Lerner, an internationally renowned mezzo-soprano and educator who came to the operatic stage late in life, died on March 29 in Pittsburgh. She was 61. The cause was complications of a heart tumor diagnosed 12 years ago, said her husband, Martin. Ms. Lerner’s career as a performer was not conventional and began as a passionate hobby. She was a music teacher in public schools in Pittsburgh for several years before she received her master’s degree in voice at Carnegie Mellon University in 1975. She sang in choirs and recitals and eventually progressed to performing in small opera houses. She graduated to bigger opera houses with her debut performance at New York City Opera on Nov. 6, 1979, singing the role of Sextus in “La Clemenza Di Tito.” In a New York Times review of Donizetti’s “Anna Bolena” at New York City Opera in 1980, Donal Henahan called her singing of the romance “both full-voiced and innocently ardent.” Ms. Lerner was recognized for her stage presence and her ability to act, on and off the operatic stage. She was born Emilia Lipczer in Poland in 1945 to Jewish parents who fled the Nazis and lived in the woods until Ms. Lerner was a year old, Mr. Lerner said. The family then moved to Paris and immigrated to the Bronx seven years later. Ms. Lerner attended the High School of Music and Art in Manhattan and graduated from Queens College with a bachelor’s degree in music education. She met her husband, a flutist, during one of his performances at Carnegie Hall in 1967 and moved to Pittsburgh with him in 1969, soon after graduation. Ms. Lerner was the head of the voice department at Carnegie Mellon University until 2005, when she started teaching at home because of her illness. She was also a cantorial soloist for Rodef Shalom Temple in Pittsburgh for 25 years. Ms. Lerner performed with the Metropolitan Opera, the Teatro alla Scala, the Glyndebourne Festival Opera, the Théâtre du Chatelet in Paris, the Netherlands Opera, the Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie and the Canadian Opera, the Seattle Opera, the Houston Grand Opera, the Dallas Opera, the Santa Fe Opera and the Washington Opera at Kennedy Center, among others. Besides her husband, Ms. Lerner is survived by her son, Daniel, of New York, and her sister, Lizette Corman of Oradell, N.J." [Source]

"Mimi Lerner (May 20, 1945 — March 29, 2007) was a Polish-American mezzo-soprano and later head of the voice department at Carnegie Mellon University. Lerner was born Emilia Lipczer in Sambor, Poland in 1945 to Jewish parents who hid in the woods to avoid Nazis until she was one. They then moved to Paris and later to the Bronx. Lerner graduated from Queens College with a bachelor's degree in music education. She was teaching in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania while earning a master's degree at Carnegie Mellon. What started as a singing hobby led to her debut at the New York City Opera in 1979, singing Sextus in La clemenza di Tito. Later NYCO assignments included Adalgisa in Norma, Bradamante in Alcina, Smeton in Anna Bolena, and leading roles in the Central Park trilogy (which consists of Deborah Drattell and Wendy Wasserstein's The Festival of Regrets, Michael Torke and A. R. Gurney's Strawberry Fields, and Robert Beaser and Terrence McNally's The Food of Love). Since the early 1980s she was a regular guest artist with opera companies throughout the United States, including the Dallas Opera, Glimmerglass Opera, the Houston Grand Opera, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the Metropolitan Opera, the Opera Theater of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh Opera, the Santa Fe Opera, Seattle Opera, and the Washington National Opera. She appeared on the international stage at La Scala, the Théâtre du Châtelet, and the Glyndebourne Festival. She died in the Pittsburgh neighborhood of Oakland from complications of a heart tumor, which had been diagnosed a dozen years earlier. She was 61 years old." [Source]