Lucy Jane Wasserstein, your mom loved you very very very much. Even if she described your conception as “a surreal cross between PBS’s ‘Nature’ and the Food Channel.” Or maybe especially because she did.

Playwright and author Wendy Wasserstein died on Monday. She was fifty-five. Here is my favorite monologue from her play “An American Daughter” wherein the Jewish African-American Doctor Judith Kaufman remembers some advice during Tashlikh.