My Sabbath Elevator, Part II

Remember this post of mine?

I do. (Vaguely.)

Penned in the heady autumn of 2009-- before I was thirty. Before I was a father. Before I could no longer string together a cogent thought or coherent sentence secondary to the exhaustion that comes with becoming a diaper-changing machine.

I read this old post of mine with a mixture of intrigue, apathy, and amusement. Such vitriol spewed forth from me. Such offensively pulchritudinous platitudes.

Such piss. Such vinegar.

Sometimes I think I've mellowed out, now that I'm thirty-one and the father of two ardent squishies. Other times, though, I think I'm probably just getting warmed up.

I thought, when I read the infuriating "New York Times" article about the bizarre concept of the Shabbat elevator three years ago that I would write my blog, express my rage against my upbringing, my faith, my fellow crazies, and that would be that. The "New York Times" would move on, My Masonic Apron would move on, I would move on, the Jews in their insipid, self-congratulatory perpetually-motioned elevator would move up and down and up and down and up and down and the world would keep spinning on its charming little axis.

Unfortunately, as I thumbed around on my Blackberry's trackball on nytimes.com (shitty mobile edition) I realized that we're not really moving at all. We're quite assuredly standing still, though the elevator numbers of life continue to rise and fall with oh such cunning deception. My weary eyes glazed over the headline and my heart fell:

March 6, 2012

"On Jewish Sabbath, Elevators Do All the Work"

And all I could do was shake my head. And, no, I didn't say, "Oy," but thanks for asking.

We're still talking about this? Really? Part of the reason I stopped blogging hyperactively in the first place was because I felt like I was repeating myself, and here is the "New York Times" writing about this subject matter as if they'd just discovered it? Maybe the "New York Times" should throw in the towel, too.

When I last wrote about the Shabbat elevator, I was angry-- angry about hypocrisy and illogical practices and self-righteousness. Three years later, I feel the same way. I'm angry about the same things, I'm angry that Judaism's absurd inanities are fodder to entertain businesspeople on their iPads on their way to work on the subway. I can't imagine the "New York Times" would allow one of its staff writers to pen an article titled,

"On December 25, WASPs Don Ridiculous Sweaters and Sing Cloying Songs in the Cold"

But it's more than that. I'm not really angry at the Times, though I do kind of think they're beating a dead (Jewish) horse, I'm angry at Jews. Yeah, my peeps.

(Yo.)

We're immigrants. Foreigners. Outsiders. We came to this country in droves prior to the turn of the 20th century, and then again after World War II. My father came with a few of his hooligan, Jewfro'd friends in 1972 to get into textiles, never dreaming that it was perhaps an unwise choice. And I remember the line from "Cool Hand Luke", "What we got here is a failure to communicate."

Maybe what we've got here is a failure to assimilate.

Assimilation is often said and viewed as a poisonous word-- the dilution of culture and pride and faith-- but I posit that a little bit of assimilation is necessary for survival. It's healthy, it's normal, it's... well, okay. When I read about Orthodox Jews requiring special elevators to accommodate the Jewish requirement that you "not make spark nor fire" on the Sabbath, I guess that just makes me feel a little hinky. I mean, when you see a bunch of Jews crowding into one elevator and the rest of the world getting into another one, does that... I don't know... remind you of anything in particular?

WHITES ------------------------ COLOREDS

And ne'er the two shall meet.

Segregation is segregation, whether it's mandated from without or within. I think it would benefit the people who utilize these elevators to think about the message it communicates to the rest of the world-- and "the rest of the world" is something that I don't think Orthodox Jews give much thought to on a regular basis-- and that communique might be "we're special", "we're different", "we're... chosen." And I wonder, chosen for what? Chosen to be ostracized? Chosen to be identified and looked at askew and to be regarded as queer or suspicious or funny or weird? Chosen to be pondered over in America's most significant newspaper as an oddity, as something quaint or strange? I wonder about that. And I wonder, too, how the Orthodox Jewish community would feel if their special elevators were identified by a big yellow star, inscribed with the word "JUDEN".

You know, just to make them easier to find.

What a Trip (A Review: Sort Of)

Film classifications/genres kind of get on my nerves.

(If you just asked yourself the question, "But, what doesn't?" then I love you.)

Oftentimes, I'll see a comedy and come away sad, and will know for sure that I just watched a great comedy. It's kind of just how I roll. If a comedy made me laugh and nothing else, I'm pretty sure it can be stated that it was basically a mediocre event-- like "Hear No Evil, See No Evil" or "Fletch". Not that those movies are really designed to get you to do anything other than laugh and possibly pee on yourself (it's been a while for me) but I tend to think the measure of a particularly great comedy is whether or not it makes me sad.

Michael Winterbottom's "The Trip", starring Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon, was a film that made me sad, but I'm not sure that it was a particularly great comedy. The synopses that I read of the film piqued my interest: two eccentric English comedians tooling around in a Range Rover doing impressions and eating expensive food seemed right up my alley, but you can never really go by those synopses. Almost without exception, they refer to Brydon's character as "annoying" or "irritating" or, to really throw it out there, "the source of eternal aggravation". After seeing the film, that seems funny to me, because Coogan's character, at least to me, was just as annoying and obnoxious, if not more so, because he was all of that combined with an acidic narcissim, lack of charity, and a voracious, predatory lust for anything with a pair of tits.

The film struck a chord with me because it reminded me of a friendship that I have which seems to hang by a tenuous thread-- it's an old friendship, formed when I was ten and when my friend was thirteen. Fortunately, I was precocious enough back then to pass for appropriate company for him and the age gap closed somewhat as we both entered college and stayed in touch. Instead of both being English, as are Brydon and Coogan, we were (and still are) Jewish and American but desperately wanted to be (and still want to be) English, and we gave lusty voice to this fetish by collaborating on Monty Python-style sketches in our teenage years and cajoling my father into filming them.

He became a professional actor, an extraordinarily talented musician, and has enjoyed the company of many an attractive, lithe and sensual young female, and I didn't.

I got married and bought a house and have stable employment and am starting a family. And he didn't.

And to say that there isn't any jealousy that exists on both sides of our relationship would be patently unfair. A few years ago, in a spurt of creativity and confidence, I helped him develop a one-man show that has now been produced in several different venues in New York City, and I have had the privilege of watching my friend perform the piece excellently at two different theatres. And I'm proud of the work I put into the piece as far as editing and suggesting material, but mostly in providing emotional support during the creative process. Do I sometimes wish it was me up there, embodying characters and receiving adulation?

Yes. I do.

Back in 2003, he asked me to run away with him. He tried to seduce me, you see. He asked me to take his hand and run away with him to New York City. At this time in my life, we were spending more time together, huddled in his tiny $400-a-month South Philly apartment, replete with the requisite pizza boxes strewn around on the floor, doing together what we did best: writing. He asked me to come to New York City with him and develop a stage show-- a comedy act-- a sketch show. A who-knows-what. But, at this time, a girl was working on seducing me, too-- and we all know how that goes. She became Mrs. Apron, and my friend went to New York by himself, and he flowered. And maybe I say it to make myself feel better about the choice I made, but part of me thinks that, were I shackled to his shin, the poor bastard might have wilted.

And I might have, too.

Watching the interplay between Coogan and Brydon, watching the tension simmering underneath as they try to out-do each other's Michael Caine impression was very hard to watch for me. Because it made me think about my friend, and my relationship with him, and how it's changed and stopped and started over the years-- over twenty-one years... Jesus Christ-- that is hard to write out like that.

I love him. I do. And love is not easy to bear, just like a good film is not easy to watch. See, it was a good film-- but I'm not sure if it was a great film. It did make me sad, though-- but I think that had more to do with my own baggage than with the film's technical and artistic aspects. We all lug tons of baggage into a movie theatre with us. There really should be overhead compartments for all that stuff.

Is it War?

In July of 2007, a young man was laid out, bedecked in the dress uniform of a New York City patrolman but, instead of the traditional policeman's cap with frontispiece, he wore a paper headband inscribed with the words:

"Holy God, holy mighty, holy immortal, have mercy on us."

And so Russell Timoshenko, age 23, was laid to rest, with 10,000 in attendance to grieve the loss. And I wonder how many of those mourners wondered, as they climbed back into their patrol cars for the long drive back to their home precincts or their home states or their homelands, if war had silently been declared on their kind.

So far this year, fourteen police officers have died in the line of duty-- nine of them have been shot to death, and two incidents, both in Florida, resulted in the deaths of two police officers from the same department. Safety in numbers is often just an illusion, as is sickeningly demonstrated in this photograph below.

Oakland, California. There is no safety in numbers-- not in the game of cops n' robbers. And I think about how many of the thousands of mourners in Oakland wondered, as they filed into this stadium in March of 2009, wondered if it was war that was being waged against them in the streets.

Cop-killing is nothing new in America. It's been around since 1792, when a sheriff's deputy in New York was attempting to effect and arrest, and the suspect shot him through a closed door. Statistically speaking, a law enforcement officer falls or is felled in this country every 52 hours. That's an average, and there is no law to this average. There are spates, and spikes, and ebbs and flows. Random or premeditated, there is no way to predict or be sure. They say that Christmas Day is an exceedingly dangerous day to be a police officer in America-- but, in 2010, only one police officer died on December the 25th. He had a heart attack while struggling with an intoxicated 16-year-old female. Nothing to do with Christmas-- just happened to be that call on that day that brought those two people together in Uvalde County, Texas.

I bristle just a little bit when I read stories run by the Associated Press or Reuters or whomever it is questioning whether or not a "war is being waged" on police officers in America because a few pathetic, cowardly motherfuckers have decided to get themselves out of whatever trouble they're in by cutting down a cop or two. As I've said before on this blog, there was only ever one "war against the police" in this country, and it was bloody, and it was real, and it was organized. The Black Liberation Army, a violent off-shoot of the Black Panthers waged a campaign to execute random police officers from New York to California and many places in between from the late 1960s to the early 1980s, resulting in the deaths of dozens of officers and the wounding/maiming of many more.

What is happening now in this country? It's deplorable. It's sad. But it is not war.


As human beings with an often imperfect grasp on what is happening around us, we fear what we do not understand, and that's understandable. To call a few cop-killings that just happen to be clustered together during the month of January "war" is a knee-jerk, it is irresponsible and sensational journalism (at best), and it is, to my way of thinking, disrespectful to the memory of the police officers who died. Call it a tragedy. Call it the shame of the nation. Call it sad, because it is. But don't call it war. Or, if you want to call it war, fine-- but then every police officer who is murdered by a felon trying to flee in the night was a war hero, because this war, if that's what it is, has been raging since 1792 and, as long as there are armed shitheads who don't want to go (usually back) to jail, then police officers are going to die.

And we will continue to say, numbed and hurt and lost, "Holy God, holy mighty, holy immortal, have mercy on us."

Have mercy on us.

Shout Out

My wife and I went to New York yesterday. Because we're too cool for school, clearly.

Actually, that's not why we went. We went because, a month ago, I bought us tickets to see the Broadway revival of Stephen Sondheim's "A Little Night Music." I saw an email ad for heavily reduced price tickets because Catherine Zeta-Jones, portraying Desiree Armfeldt, would not be appearing in that particular evening's performance.

Like any good Jew, I leapt at the opportunity to see a Broadway show for cheap money. I mean, I would love to see Catherine Zeta-Jones take a shower-- but I don't much need to see her on Broadway.

I love "A Little Night Music." I saw it when I was fifteen years old in downtown Philly and, while much of the restrained comedy and sexual overtones (and undertones) no doubt escaped my still-forming synapses, I immediately fell under the spell of Sondheim's delightful music. At one point, I had recordings of the show on audio cassette, CD, and LP. I lost the tape a while ago. When I was still making mix tapes & CDs for my wife in the infancy of our relationship, back when it was a Pittsburgh-Philly thing, I included songs from Gilbert & Sullivan operettas, and "A Little Night Music" amongst the bold, brooding, and baritonriffic voices of contemporary and not-so-contemporary folk musicians whom I also adore.

Mrs. Apron had me explain the plot of "A Little Night Music." Who's Count Carl Magnus? Does Henrick really play the cello onstage? Why does Charlotte do what she does? And what the fuck is up with that "Miller's Song" song? I did my best to explain the show, and soon, Mrs. Apron grew to love it, too, sight unseen. We would sing along with the CD or the record and it, strangely, became a part of us.

And so, for her birthday in October, I took Mrs. Apron, and her sister who happened to be visiting, to see a local production of the show in downtown Philly. And, around fifteen or so minutes into the show, I started fantasizing about slashing my throat with the edge of the playbill. My companions were heartily disappointed. My sister-in-law & wife were, at times, asleep-- especially during Madame Leonora Armfeldt's drowsy song, "Liaisons."

Then, in early March, I saw that email about "cheap" Broadway tickets to the revival.

So, yesterday, we went to New York. Whenever I go to New York, I always emotionally prepare myself for the possibility that any number of awful things will happen to/around me.

* The car will get stolen.

* My wallet will get stolen.

* I will get shot.

* My wife will get raped.

* I will get yelled at with profanations.

* We will get lost.

* We will fuck up the subway thing.

* A giant, rabid subway rat will gnaw off my testicles.

Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. You know how it is.

While we returned home at 2:00am with my scrote intact, two of the things on that list did, in fact, happen. We fucked up the subway thing. We waited around on the wrong platform after the show for approximately half-an-hour before realizing that an A, C, or E train was, well, not going to come there save for an act of God.

And I got yelled at with profanations.

We had just spilled out onto the traffic-walled road right before the tolls to the Holland Tunnel. Gas stations on the right, an newly-erected, enormous fucking Home Depot on the right-- tolls far off in the unattainable distance. Cars squeezing into lanes-- people forgetting they don't have EZ Pass, everyone cutting each other across for one lousy inch of progress-- preparing oneself to become a New York City driver, pro tempore. Being a gorgeous day, I had the windows open, when I heard a sarcastic granny-voiced mutter from somewhere to my right,

"You're really generous."

I heard this as a light blue Toyota Sienna minivan was about to mate with the left rear quarter-panel of my newly-acquired Volvo. Now, normally, I do not respond to people who say things to me while I am on the road, because I have this innate fear of getting Glocked in the face. but I didn't mind tousseling with some turkey-necked grammaw. And so, against my better judgment, I turned and said,

"I'm sorry-- what did you just say to me?"

Grammaw, now I saw she was in the passenger-seat of the minivan, said,

"I said you're so very generous."

Her son, approximately fifty years old with a tree-trunk neck and a jarhead hairdo-- probably an ex-Army officer, added,

"You're a real asshole."

I thought about the contradiction inherent in their two statements and I said,

"Well, am I very generous, or am I a real asshole-- I mean, which is it?"

"You're both!" the son replied, explaining the apparent incongruity.

"Oh! Thank you," I said, "thank you very much."

Grammaw threw in, in case I didn't realize why she was upset, "we were trying to get into this lane."

"Well," I said, "I didn't see you."

And then traffic forged ahead an inch or two, and they fell in behind us. While they undoubtedly forgot about the incident in a matter of minutes, I was upset by it for the whole day, every so often replaying the exchange in my brain.

"They're right, you know, those people in the minivan" I said to my wife, later in the day, "I am both very generous and a real asshole, depending on the circumstances."

We went to the fabulous Museum of Art and Design, wandered around there for a long time, admiring what creative people can do with paper and cardboard. It was a glorious day. Later, we ate dinner at a restaurant called Bali Nusa Inda. We love Bali Nusa-- because we honeymooned in Bali and eating that food, chicken satay, Nasi Goreng, Nasi Champur-- it brings everything back. It stirs the fire in the belly and the love in the heart.

Quite schmoopie after our honeymoon revival meal, we walked along the street towards Broadway and managed to catch the attention, and shout out, of another unfamiliar New Yorker. She was a girl, standing by a pole, a twenty-something girl, in a nice raincoat with long hair parted down the center, and she had just put her Blackberry to her ear to make a call, and she watched us approach her. I don't know if it was our vintage eyeglasses that caught her attention-- probably not-- everyone our age in New York City wears vintage eyeglasses... I don't know if it was my wife's Anthropologie skirt, which I bought her for her birthday last year, or the year before-- I don't know if it was my 1950's polyester blazer and skinny tie-- or the way we held each other in post-Bali bliss as we ambled down the sidewalk, but this young woman watched us approaching her and, as we got within inches of her, she put her phone down and said to me, softly, as we passed,

"Oh, my God-- if you two aren't married, please get married. You're adorable together."

And the play was wonderful, too.

Helper

"The most sublime act is to set another before you."

-- William Blake --

It kind of seems like all I did this weekend was help people.

Now, I don't want to sound like I think I'm fucking Mother Theresa here, (whoa, that came out... wrong), but this weekend was largely devoted to being of service to others. I don't know if this is really my style or not. There are times when I can be a real selfish bastard, I'll be the first to stand up and admit that. Many times, when I have some spare time to myself, I'll just putz around and blog or buy shit that I don't need on e-bay. I could be making donations to charity or calling an old friend or writing a letter to my step-grandmother or stripping wallpaper or meeting the neighbors or making my wife dinner or tidying up, but I often... am doing none of those things.

(Jesus. You know-- I'd get a lot more writing done if I put in fewer hyperlinks.)

Anyway, trend or not, this weekend was helper weekend. On Saturday, I left my home in the cushy Pennsylvania burbs at 8:00am to travel 115 miles to bustling, honking, motherfucking New York City to help Dave move from his 8x11 cell, excuse me, apartment in Chelsea, into a comparatively palatial one bedroom in Brooklyn. I had the forethought to take the rear seats out of the PT Cruiser for maximum shithaulin' capacity. Temperatures were high on Saturday, and we worked our asses off. It took two trips, back and forth. On the way to Brooklyn the second time, we got stuck in a wall of cars on the Brooklyn Bridge for approximately an hour and a half in 93 degree heat. We got to watch a few innings of a little league game, though, being played at a local baseball diamond, and Dave shouted encouraging sentiments out the window like,

"You guys are awful!" and "Okay! Time to switch pitchers!" and, my favorite, "You suck, 13!"

Ain't he a sweetie? Actually, he is. For helping him move, he bought me a delectable dinner at "Rub," a BBQ place that, miraculously, did not reappear all over my dashboard on the drive home. I pulled into my driveway at 12:19am, sending the only coherent text message to Dave I could muster:

"Here."

Sunday's service call was at the library where my Mom works. It was the Craft Fair, and my wife was experiencing the jitters as a first-time exhibitor. The Fair didn't start until 1pm, but my mother asked me to be there to help "Daddy and the husbands" set up the tables. I told her that "Daddy & The Husbands" could be an awesome band name. She didn't care.

So, lethargic and eating dry frosted wheat cereal from a bowl in the car, I drove over to the library to set up tables. My father was there, doling out like we were his privates on parade. But, for a change, it was my mother who was actually in charge, the library being her home turf since 1987. It was a pleasure watching my 5'2" mild-mannered mother usurping the Israeli Staff-Sergeant for a change.

After I set up the tables, it was back home to help my wife get all her crafts together:

Potato-stamped baby onesies

Sock monkeys

Coin purses

Handbags

Tote-bags

I-Spy bags

Baby jumpers

All hand-done. All beautiful. All Mrs. Apron.

We set up her table. I offered suggestions about display, and most of them taken. Interacting with the kids who came to our table to play with the I-Spy bags was the most fun part of the day. Even more fun than running into my perpetually intoxicated piano teacher, an annoying person my mother used to work with who tells endlessly painful stories about me as a child, the mother of one of my high school crushes and other ghosts from my past.

Then, when the craft-fair was done, we packed up all her shit, loaded it into the car, and I helped Daddy & The Husbands break down all the tables. Total time involved in craft-fair: 7 hours.

Helping people is good. I enjoy doing it. My wife says, "you're a helper. It's what you know how to do. People call you, and you come, and you do, and you don't keep score." I don't know if that's true. Sometimes I feel like my pool of sympathy is shockingly shallow-- the plights of a significant portion of the population barely move me to grimace. I guess I have to care about you first. I wonder sometimes if this is the true reason I was always drawn to "helping professions" as a child and as an adolescent and as an adult, even if it didn't always pan out.

I guess doing it as an avocation is just as well.

An Open Letter to The People Screaming Outside the "Today" Show

Dear People Screaming Outside the "Today" Show:

What the fuck is wrong with you?

Seriously.

Mrs. Apron & I watch twenty three minutes of the "Today" show every morning, and, every morning, there you are. You're screaming your goddamn heads off about... well, I don't really know about what.

I don't think you know either.

You're standing behind barriers, guarded by police officers, while a middle-aged white guy, a middle-aged white woman and a middle aged black man chit-chat about the latest man-vs-animal incident or what the weather's like in Seattle, and you're tearing your vocal chords to shreds and popping your eyes and lunging against the blockades like you're witnessing the Jonas Brothers giving each other CPR.

Look at yourselves. You're grown people. Get a fucking grip. Stop shaming your neighbors back home in Des Moines by identifying yourself as from there when Al sticks his microphone to your frothing lips for your two seconds of immediately forgotten-about noteriety. I would cringe if I heard some loo-loo announce my hometown as their residence. I wouldn't want people thinking, "God, are they all like that?"

You're all tourists, I have to believe that-- except for the old, black guy who's there every single morning (Lenny, you're a whole different blog post, but I'll get to you eventually) so, I have to ask you,

WHAT THE FUCK?!

You're in New York City. To most people, it's the cultural epicenter of the United States. There's ducks string up by their doingities in Chinatown shop-windows, there's more museums and restaurants and cupcake shops and important architecture and theatre and shopping and even the Statue of motherfuckin' Liberty, for Christ's sake. What, pray, are you doing, freezing your tiggities off, yelling your fucking heads off at the "Today" show? Go take a walk in Chelsea. Go eat some street peanuts. Go to Ground Zero. Go... fuck yourselves, you demented housewives. Lauer's married, girls-- and chances are, if he weren't, he wouldn't be picking out his next bride from the ranks of the freakishly menopausal wailing banshees from the dubious Midwest who are in NYC for a day to catch "Mary Poppins" and have a good throat-rip at the "Today" show.

Honestly, people, I've seen better, more logical behavior from scores of intoxicated people. And I'd be willing to be that, at 7:30am, most of you cannot even claim alcohol as an excuse for your bizarre behavior. That's pretty early, even for the most hardcore of drunkards. In fact, I think I would have more respect for you if you were holed up in some shitty-ass dive, sucking on a gin instead of yelling so loudly that I could not hear the national weather forecast.

I was pretty sure that this unfortunate phenomenon was strictly an example of home-grown American idiocy, so imagine how saddened I was when the "Today" show went to Ireland to film for St. Patrick's Day and, there they were: our Irish brethern and sisteren, screaming their fool freckles off.

This is called "social loafing." It just takes one Irish asshole who saw Americans behaving like assholes to encourage a whole cluster of Irish people to start behaving like similar assholes.

Why? Because we're American, and we're assholes, and that's how we roll.