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There’s the softer side of Lucie, in her salmon-pink velour pants, cowl-neck top and chandelier earrings of pink and crystal.

Then there’s the animal Larry referenced, with flashing eyes, spunky highlighted hair, bright smile, throaty laugh and flailing hands.

“I remember seeing ‘Lost in Yonkers’ with Mercedes Ruehl and I wrote Neil Simon a letter and said, ‘This is the one,’” Lucie says. “He’s so prolific … I was dissolved in tears watching this play. It’s kind of a funny character, Bella, and it has a lot of humor until it doesn’t, and it’s a very important and dramatic play, really.”

During the Broadway run of the play, Lucie would take over the role of Bella – the fragile child-woman in a dark, dysfunctional immigrant family – an experience that underscores her belief in the importance of childrearing.

A child psychologist in California once told Lucie – mother of three, stepmother of two – to ‘spend 15 minutes each day alone with each child… alone.’”

“He said, ‘You don’t understand, it makes them feel worthy of love,’” she says. “I started to cry and it seems like almost every horrible scenario where these people turn out to be ax-murderers, you can trace it back to these people not feeling worthy of love. Something in their childhood told them, ‘You’re nothing.’”

That was the catalyst in raising her own children.

But as a couple, Larry and Lucie had been living a show-biz life that made parenting a bit more complicated than usual.

“My mother had passed away (in 1989), we were going to stay in California for two years and we ended up staying for four years, just going through ‘that’ when a parent dies,” she says. “Going through their estate, it’s one thing. But when Lucille Ball is your parent and she dies, it’s a whole other thing.”

Katonah, where Larry and Lucie subsequently made their dream home, meant public school for some of their brood, more time together, “and it really made a big difference.

“I had thought I was doing it differently,” she says, her voice the softest it’s been this interview. “I was born the year the show went on the air. She’s (Lucille Ball) getting bigger and bigger. They’re hiding her behind lampshades. She has me in July and she starts filming the ‘I Love Lucy’ show, so it was like, ‘Bye.’”

She swings her arms as if she’s passing a bundled baby.