20 YEARS TO LIFE

Yiddishe Cup is the house band at the Lake County (Ohio) Heritage Festival.  We play there every July.  Twenty years in a row.

Why don’t the organizers get somebody else?

Because we talk.  Bluegrass bands and old-time musicians don’t talk.  They just pick.  Folk musicians, they’ll talk, but it’s pabulum about trees and trysts.  Polka guys, they talk — to each other.  And they mumble.

Lake County, just east of Cleveland, is a stronghold of Italians and Slovenians.  Many are retired railroad and factory workers.  They like to hear “Eaton Axle,” “Fisher Body,” and “Collinwood Railroad Yards.”

Those aren’t songs.  They’re just words, and I like to say them. For instance, I’ll say, “Who remembers the Collinwood Yards on East One-hundred Fifty-second?”  There are a couple klezmer train songs.  There’s a hit from Russia: “7:40.”

We do “Gino,” an Orthodox Jewish tune with an Italian-sounding name.  We also do “That’s Morris,” a parody of “That’s Amore.” We introduce it with: “This is by that great Ohio Jewish composer Dean Martin.  His name in Hebrew means ‘flying tiny octopus.'”

You have to be there.

The Slovenians like to hear “Slovenian” pronounced properly: Slovene-yun, not Slovene-ian.

I explain Hebrew is loshn kodesh, the holy tongue, like Latin. Yiddish by contrast is mama-loshn, the mother tongue.  “Mama Lotion. You can buy it at CVS.”

You have to be there.

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2 of 2 posts for 7/21/10

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Sun. (July 25):  Yiddishe Cup is at the Lake County Heritage Festival, formerly the Little Mountain Folk Festival.  Painesville, Ohio. $. www.lakehistory.org.  Final revised schedule: Yiddishe Cup is on at 11 a.m., 1 p.m. and 4 p.m.

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Thurs., July 29:  “Driving Mr. Klezmer” duo show at Cain Park, Cleveland Hts., 7 p.m.   $20 in advance, $23 at the door. $2 off for 60+ and students.  216-371-3000 or www.cainpark.com.  If you miss this show, your last words might be “I really screwed up.”

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