Lin-Manuel Miranda

1

THE TOP OF THE WORLD

Lin-Manuel didn't like to practice piano. He enjoyed making up songs, tinkering on the upright outside his sister's bedroom, even though no one would listen to his originals; his sister, Cita, was too busy, and his parents were always at work. But the lessons from his piano teacher didn't excite him. At age six, he'd been taught only the first five notes of the C major scale. It wasn't fair. His sister was six years older, so she got to use all the keys. Cita, who practiced methodically, could play fancy pieces by Kabalevsky and Mozart. He was stuck with kiddie songs like "Camptown Races" and "Salizar, the Siamese Cat." The only piece he relished was "Pop Goes the Weasel." That one leaped up to the sixth note for an exciting "Pop!" And he figured out that if he started playing it two white keys below C, down in A minor, its chipper mood vanished, and the song sounded deliciously scary.

To get Lin-Manuel to his piano lessons, his Abuela Mundi took him two stops on the subway from their northern Manhattan neighborhood down to 181st Street. When they rode the escalator out of the station, they could see the gray towers of the George Washington Bridge looming above the brick buildings. His teacher, a friendly woman with curly hair and big glasses, was a little disappointed that he didn't practice, but she wanted to support him. After he ran through the assigned pieces, she let him try out his original tunes, and she gave them sophisticated-sounding names, like "Tarantella."

Soon it was time for Lin-Manuel to perform at his first piano recital. On the appointed day, he dressed up in a white button-down shirt tucked into blue slacks. He climbed up onto the bench in front of the black grand piano. As instructed, he played "Camptown Races." And when he finished, the audience clapped.

Lin-Manuel looked up. No one had told him that applause came with playing the piano. That was a pleasant surprise.

"I know another one!" he announced. He played the second piece in his repertoire. The audience clapped some more.

"I know another one!" he said again. He played a third piece.

After the fourth piece, his teacher pulled him off the bench.

He'd gotten a taste of something addictive. "Music became a route to applause," he later reflected. "I realized cool things could happen if I kept at this."

Everyone in the Miranda family tells the tale of this piano recital. It's become an origin story-the moment when the future global entertainer stepped into the spotlight. (Lin-Manuel even called one of his music-production companies I Know Another One, Inc.) It wasn't the debut of a piano prodigy; he wasn't Stevie Wonder, dazzling audiences on the keyboard as a child. His sister was the skilled pianist. But he, the younger child, had the appetite for attention. And once he experienced that thrill, he couldn't wait to feel it again.

Performing also offered a way to channel the emotional vulnerability and identity divisions that characterized his childhood. His performances hadn't always met with acclaim. In preschool, he learned to read before some of his classmates; when he opened a book at recess, the other boys threw sand in his mouth. "I don't want to go back to school," he told his mother. If he saw the school letterhead, he burst into tears.

He was a sensitive, empathetic child. He cried when he saw a news report about the famine in Ethiopia in the early 1980s. He cried when he saw an unhoused person on the street. Even the chord changes in Paul Simon's "Bridge over Troubled Water" made him cry. "Mommy, that song is too sad," he'd say. "You have to change it."

Luz Towns-Miranda knew what to do. "I'm a psychologist, so part of my job is helping my kids navigate the world and their emotions," she says. "I wanted to let him know it was okay to feel what he was feeling."

She got Lin-Manuel a picture book that set out a psychological framework for handling feelings, a system called transactional analysis, in childappropriate terms. "Your feelings are as real as your big toe," T.A. for Tots explained next to an illustration of a sniffling turtle. "If you are not happy, you have a right to feel your unhappiness and talk about it." The book described "cold pricklies" that made you feel bad and "warm fuzzies" that made you feel better. To counteract the cold pricklies at Lin-Manuel's preschool, Luz made sure that her son got plenty of warm fuzzies at home: a relaxation exercise, a song at bedtime. She'd grown up with Al Jolson tunes and would sing him "April Showers" and "California, Here I Come" until he fell asleep.

Luz decided to become a psychologist when she was thirteen. She wanted to know why people behaved the way they did. Her Mexican-American father, an engineer in the merchant marine, came home to their New Jersey suburb for only two days every two weeks. Her mother had grown up on a farm in Puerto Rico without electricity, one of thirteen children, unable to go to school past third grade because she couldn't afford the necessary shoes; as a homemaker in East Brunswick, she taught herself English by reading the Daily News. Luz, one of six siblings, helped her mother with the groceries, the laundry, the ironing, the childcare. But she wanted out.

She enrolled at Rutgers and moved out of her parents' house, supporting herself by working two or three jobs at a time to cover rent and tuition. Then, as a sophomore, she was diagnosed with thyroid cancer. After surgery, she says the doctors told her, "If it doesn't come back in two years, you'll be fine. If it does, we'll make you as comfortable as possible."

As she faced this life-threatening prospect, she knew that she wanted to become a mother and a psychologist. When she was still alive two years later, she got pregnant. ("It was a distraction from thinking about death," she says.) The Supreme Court had just decided Roe v. Wade, so she knew she had options, but she wanted the child even though the father wasn't involved. She graduated from college in 1973, and that fall, little Luz was born-Lucecita, or Cita for short.

Luz had met her first goal of becoming a mother; now it was time for her second goal. When Cita was three, Luz got into New York University's doctoral program in psychology, recruited for a new initiative to diversify the program by attracting top Black and Hispanic students.

Luis A. Miranda Jr., a third-year doctoral student from Puerto Rico, interviewed her for admission. He arrived late; he'd been at a protest. He asked Luz out on a date-a trip to Washington, DC, to march outside the Supreme Court in support of affirmative action. (The court was hearing arguments in the Bakke case about racial criteria for university admissions.) For their second date, back in New York, they danced to a Puerto Rican protest band.

Luis was sprightly and compact with a thick black mane of hair and a bushy mustache. Luz was petite with sparkling brown eyes, dark curly hair, and a mischievous smile. Three months later, they got married. After a ceremony in New Jersey, they had a short honeymoon: dinner at Tavern on the Green, a new musical called Runaways at the Public Theater, and a night at the Plaza.

Luis soon legally adopted Cita. "You're the best daddy I ever had," she told him. The family moved into an NYU apartment in Greenwich Village that had a view of the Twin Towers. Cita got her own bedroom with a princess canopy bed.

Luz wanted to work with children, and when she finished her coursework, she took an internship with the Jewish Board of Family and Children's Services. Then in 1979, she found out, to her surprise, that she was pregnant again. Luis asked his own childhood caretaker from Vega Alta, a stout, older woman named Edmunda Claudio-Mundi for short-to come to New York to help them out. Living space was tight. A bunk bed for Cita and Mundi replaced the canopy bed; a futon next to a crib served Luz and Luis and the baby. After Lin-Manuel was born, on January 16, 1980, Luz started to look for a new home.

She spotted an ad for a rarity in New York: an affordable house on a pretty cobblestoned street facing a forested park. It had an upstairs and a downstairs apartment, a driveway, and a finished basement. Where could such a marvel exist? In Inwood, just above Washington Heights, at the very northern tip of Manhattan. The neighborhood had become home to Jewish and Irish immigrants at the start of the twentieth century, then, after World War II, to Puerto Ricans, Cubans, and Dominicans. When the Mirandas made an offer to the elderly Jewish couple who owned the house, the Irish tenants upstairs told Luis, "You won't have to worry about us. We're not living with spics."

The Mirandas got the house for seventy-five thousand dollars; thanks to loans from relatives, they could make the down payment. They moved upstairs and sublet the downstairs apartment.

Cita attended Greenwich Village Neighborhood School by their old apartment at NYU, and when Lin-Manuel was four, he joined her there for preschool. It took an hour on the A Train to ride two hundred blocks south from Inwood. On the subway map, it looked as though they lived at the top of the world. On the uptown ride...