Throughout his life, my father also innocently enough mispronounced Cuccia "coo-chi" too, and it wasn't until I was an adult that Burt Lancaster actually set the record straight. He loved Italy and everything Italian actually, and in particular, Italian Opera, which my grandmother introduced my father and Burt to when they were children. One day Burt told me that our last name is actually pronounced "coo-cha." Literally, he said, it meant a bed for a dog or something one would call out to a dog to order him or her to go to its bed. Lovely. But I later learned it also means a type of pastry...ah, much better!

My father and Burt spent a good deal of their childhood together. They met when they were nine years old at camp and together developed an avid interest in acrobatics. They also lived in the same neighborhood and belonged to the same community center - my father lived amongst all of the Italians and Burt in the Irish section.

The neighborhood community center was called the Union Settlement House, located in what is now Harlem, New York. One day, a well-built Australian guy there named Curley Brent (of course he had either very short cropped or no hair) demonstrated the swings and flips he could do on the horizontal bar in the gym. Burt and my father were mesmerized and soon Curley was teaching them everything he knew to do on the single bar.