To Sir, With Love + My Teenage Popstar Mom

Those of you who watch Glee know the season finale had a version of the old song To Sir, With Love. My mom loves this song and used to sing it all the time when we were little, so it was a nice surprise to hear it on the tv.

For those that don’t know, my mom was a teenage popstar in Chile. She plays the guitar by ear, too, so when we were growing up, we spent lots of time singing while my mom played for us. It was like non-stop karaoke in our house. She sang from age 14 to age 19, when she came to the U.S.

A while back I put a few of her songs on YouTube, along with some of her scanned magazine pictures. You can see/hear her here. She is the young one on the front row. (We have a box of magazines and other stuff, I’ve just been really lazy about scanning it all in.) Her stage name was Tina Vilches. If you read Spanish and Google her name, you’ll find some stuff online about her. I get fan mail for her on the YouTube site, and I forward it to her. It always makes me chuckle a bit that people know her in this way.

Sometimes people ask me what it was like to have a former teenage popstar as a mom. Well, it was probably very different from having a mom who wasn’t a former teenage popstar, but it was also a lot of fun. And, I kick butt at karaoke. Thanks, mom!