She’s not as famous as her half-sister Babs, but at least this daughter of Brooklyn is making a home-coming.
Barbra Streisand’s sibling Roslyn Kind — a revered singer in her own right — will play the Brooklyn Center for the Performing Arts on April 28m, marking the Flatbush native’s stage debut in the borough.
Kind, who lives in Los Angeles, said she hasn’t crossed the East River since a trip to legendary Lundy’s Restaurant in Sheepshead Bay during the early 1970s, but she’s excited to see how her old home turf has changed.
“I’m really anxious to see the areas that have been built up and brought back. I have friends who tell me, ‘You have to see this, you won’t believe it,’” said Kind, who grew up in the sprawling Vanderveer Estates at the corner of Foster and Brooklyn avenues in East Flatbush — just a subway stop away from Brooklyn College, which runs the Center for the Performing Arts.
Kind recalled hopping on the train to visit a record shop (the jazz standards and show tunes singer was a Beatlemaniac at the time) and stopping by a favorite soda fountain near the college before going to see movies at the school’s theater, which has since become a cineplex.
Kind started singing while a student at Yeshiva Rambam at the corner of Kings Highway and York Avenue and at her temple on Glenwood Road, and continued in the school choruses at the Erasmus Hall High School Annex.
When Kind was 13, the crooner and the rest of her family said goodbye to the borough and left for Manhattan, but she’s always carried a piece of Brooklyn inside her (even though she doesn’t visit much).
“My roots are with me always even on stage, they’re part of who I am. That never leaves me. I never forget those roots. Like a New Yorker I still walk and talk fast,” Kind said.
Roslyn Kind at the Brooklyn Center for the Performing Arts at Brooklyn College [2900 Campus Rd. at Hillel Place in Flatbush, (718) 951-4500] April 28 at 8 pm. Performance $35, Performance plus VIP Reception $175. Visit purchase.tickets.com.
Reach reporter Thomas Tracy at [email protected] or by calling (718) 260-2525.
