“We’ll go to a cocktail party and bring our guitars and sing,” Lucy Simon told The New York Times in 2015. “And people love it.”
In the end, she added, they said to each other, “Let’s see if we can pay the price by singing.”
Carly was a student at Sarah Lawrence College and Lucy was attending the Cornell University-New York Hospital School of Nursing in New York in the early 1960s when, during summer vacation, they caught a bus to Provincetown, Mass. (They wanted to hitchhike, but their mother thwarted that plan.) They quickly landed a gig at a bar called Moors, where the musical had just been drafted. They arrived for their first show in handpicked matching blouses.
“We didn’t learn until much later that Moors was a gay and lesbian bar,” Carly Simon wrote in her 2015 memoir, “Boys in the Tree.” “What the audience is mostly about, wearing ripped jeans and wearing a naked motorcycle jacket, about these two sisters has been lost in time. Lucy and I took a pretty serious look at our wardrobe in the Moors, and in return, the audience might think we’re two nursing moms from Switzerland, or an escape from a nearby festival. “
They call themselves the Simon Sisters, although, as Carly Simon wrote, “Lucy and I agree that our stage names sound confusing and borderline embarrassing, plus neither of us wanted to. being labeled – or dismissed – is just another novel sister act.”
In that book, Ms. Simon recalls the dynamics of the sisters when they first entered the show.
“Anyone who pays close attention will notice that I, Carly, the sister, have tried to look and act like Lucy, the older sister,” she wrote. “I am taller than Lucy now, but emotionally, Lucy is still the one above, the light, the beauty, the center of it all. Then as now, my sister was my background influence, my heroine, my pilot. “
