The Amazing Mimsie
Heartland International Film Festival winning video of a loud Jewish New Yorker who, along with her 20-year-old son, broke laws to save 2 homeless boys from trauma & abuse of the worst kind in 1989.
My first born was named for her favorite person, Maya Angelou. My second born daughter was named for her, the only mother figure I have ever known.
Miriam ‘Mimsie’ Price grew up with her mother, father, and two sisters on Long Island. Specifically in Woodmere, New York. She’d grown up as a sort of black swan among her sisters—still beautiful but bewildering to her family—and I sometimes wondered if her overwhelming generosity had come from a genuine compassion born from her early experiences as the odd duck of the family.
The Price family came from wealthy means, such that Mimsie and her sisters grew up having both a maid and butler at their beckon call. I remember her telling me stories of Vera the maid, and a butler they called Uncle James. Both of whom Mimsie was very close to, which now looking back makes sense. Ruth and Carol were older, and both possessed markedly different personalities compared to Mimsie.
According to Mimsies first and only husband, she was considered a tomboy by kids of the area where they grew up. I know this because her ex-husband penned something resembling a memoir just before his death in 2021 from cancer. Likely brought on by his time in the Army, where he spent time around nuclear bomb testing sites.
The thing is—it was true. Mimsie was indeed different from most everyone else I had met up to this point in my 7 years on earth. It was a fact I quickly took notice of the very first day I met her. Walking in and seeing her on the floor because her back had gone out was one of the first things I noticed, the second was hearing what sounded like a mix between Gilbert Godfrey and Fran Drescher come from her mouth, yelling for me to come stand next to her.
It was there in that small apartment in Oakdale Square that I would first experience the raw power and love of this Jewish woman’s sandpaper voice. The force it appeared to take for her to convey something with that thick of a Brooklyn accent, after decades of smoking, was something you had to witness to truly take in. Even then, the fact that this voice was coming from her ‘that lady’ was shocking and somewhat scary to seven-year-old me.
Her 20-year-old son had just illegally taken me from the homeless shelter I was staying at with my mother and two brothers. On the night before Christmas of 1989 at that. These are the beginning details of an amazing journey of survival me and my siblings are still traveling. But before I can approach writing the last half of this story, I must first confront the emotions the end of this story triggers within.
With that being said, the story I’m preparing to release about her son is something I’m quite glad she did not have to witness while still alive. I’m truly thankful she left this earth with the story as it seemed back in 2009. Though abuse had started years before, it wouldn’t be uncovered until 2019. Over a decade following her death.
Here’s to the woman whose sacrifices saved my life. And the son she raised.