It hasn’t been easy being James Taylor and Carly Simon’s son. “I think I realized my parents were famous just by realizing that all the other kids’ parents weren’t famous,” Ben Taylor said at a party for the book Girls Like Us, which profiles Joni Mitchell, Carole King, and his mother, at the Waverly Inn. “And so when I became a teenager and I realized what it meant, I really got awkward about the idea. I didn’t want to talk about it. I didn’t want to bring it up. And my mom would see me getting so awkward about it, going out on the street together, that she’d start calling attention to herself just to embarrass me. She’d start singing her own songs.” Today, “I feel like I’m pretty bulletproof for the embarrassment,” he said. “I had a young girlfriend recently, and I used to love to take her out and embarrass her in public. So I learned the trick.”
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