Real Music & Real Estate . . .

 
I had an op-ed, “To Life, Marriage and Wine,” in the Wall Street Journal on Saturday. Here’s the essay:

I convinced my wife to go to synagogue, which is a hard sell. My come-on was the wine. The first Saturday of the month, our synagogue passes out free bottles of Israeli kosher wine to married couples celebrating anniversaries that month.

Two friends recently called to say they were separating from their spouses. I look for reinforcement for the institution of marriage wherever I can find it. Alice and I stood on the bimah (altar) with eight other couples while congregants sang along to “Siman Tov and Mazel Tov” (good luck and congratulations). Rabbi Joshua Skoff announced the winner in the anniversary derby, a couple celebrating 55 years of matrimony.

Everybody read from the supplementary prayer booklet: “These couples have come to the synagogue to give thanks for the institution of marriage and for their mutual love and devotion.”

Bert and Alice, Oct. 22, 1978. Columbus, Ohio

One married man had a gray ponytail. There was an accountant in a suit and an obstetrician in a red pantsuit. The Torah portion was from Genesis. The rabbi noted that because Adam and Eve sinned, we are all going to die, which makes things interesting because if we lived forever we’d never get around to doing anything: “Why would you diet if you can put it off for 500 years?”

Our marriage-boosting interlude ended with: “May it be God’s will that these married couples continue to live to a ripe old age together in happiness, lightening each other’s burdens, and reaping a harvest of joy from the seeds of love they have sown in the hearts of their family.”

To life. And free wine.

 
My roommate Ed died. In 2006. I just found out about it. I thought I saw him the other day walking in Lakewood. I recognized him from the back. Nope, he’s dead.

Ed was the archetypal Lakewood Man — a poor white guy wearing a Browns hat, smoking a cigarette, shambling toward Discount Drug Mart.

I shared a duplex house with Ed and two other guys for a couple years in Cleveland Heights in the mid-1970s. I met Ed via the apartments-for-rent bulletin board at Case Western Reserve University. (A major portion of my life revolved around that bulletin board, like I met my future wife via the board.)

Ed was a nonstop liar and enjoyed talking on the phone for hours about bills he claimed he would pay, jobs he had or didn’t have, money he had or didn’t have. He worked as a security guard at CWRU.

His room was filthy, and he stunk, and he smoked nonstop. He could cook. Grant him that. He said the rest of us “lived out of cans.”

Ed had epilepsy, and one morning he went thud on the floor and started foaming at the mouth and bleeding around his tongue. He was about 6-2 and fat, so the thud was real. It rattled the house — and me. Ed should have warned us he had epilepsy. I hadn’t seen a grand mal seizure before (and haven’t since). Ed didn’t take his meds regularly. EMS got him straightened out.

I didn’t see Ed’s obit in the Plain Dealer in 2006. But I googled him after I “saw” him in Lakewood the other day. He died at 59. He had a hard life.

 
Years ago I sent out two versions of Yiddishe Cup on a single night. We did business! But often the effort wasn’t worth the logistical contortions: Yiddishe Cup undergoing mitosis. Very messy.

I named the bands the “A” Band and the “B” Band; I should have called them the red unit and the blue unit. There would have been fewer bruised egos among the musicians. I was fortunate; I always got in the “A” Band.

I didn’t start the A/B band ploy until I was about 15 years into the band biz and had a full stable of subs who knew the Yiddishe Cup Method — whatever that is.

The “B” Band

Heads-up, bandleaders, don’t play the A/B game unless you’re very experienced and totally upfront with the clients. If you lie, you might encounter what the New York boys call a “screamer gig.” That’s when the mom screams, “I didn’t hire this band! Where’s your bandleader?”

Here’s what I said on the phone when booking the “B” band: “Bert Stratton won’t be there. Nobody will notice the difference.”

—

Yiddishe Cup plays 7:15 Tues. (Oct. 14) for Simchat Torah at Park Synagogue, 27500 Shaker Blvd., Pepper Pipes, Ohio. Free.

 
I gave Livingstone, a tenant, a break on his rent because he called the police after he saw a thief stealing leaded-glass windows from the building entrance. I appreciated Livingstone’s civic involvement. Livingstone was nosy. That’s a good thing.

Two leaded-glass sidelights flanking the front door

Then a vandal scrawled graffiti on a front door. Livingstone wasn’t around. (Different building.) The building manager knew the graffiti “artist.” She even knew his phone number. My manager personally knows this derelict? The tagger hung out at a skaters’ coffeehouse, as did my manager, and had a very recognizable tag.

I phoned the graffiti kid and hung up. What if he was a loony? Let the cops handle it. Then the kid called me. “You just called,” he said.

I hate that.

The Lakewood cops found the graffiti guy and made him clean up the door. His mom helped. The kid was in high school. I didn’t press charges; he and his mom did a good job cleaning the door.

Back to the leaded-glass thief . . . He was caught, primarily due to Livingstone’s accurate ID. The thief sold the windows to an antiques store. He was eventually charged with aggravated burglary and grand theft. He didn’t do any jail time. He paid restitution to me.

 
This was in the Cleveland Plain Dealer on Friday.

Some of my elderly friends are putting out self-published memoirs or uploading original songs to Spotify. We want our grandchildren to check us out down the road.

I want my grandkids to be able to check me out for 10 years after I’m gone. Ten years is not unreasonable. I’m not greedy like Shakespeare.

I’m not in the Hall of Fame of my alma mater, Charles F. Brush High School. But I play clarinet in Yiddishe Cup, a klezmer band. That might be my best shot at somewhat-limited immortality.

Here’s the plan: I recently donated some of my klezmer band’s memorabilia to the Western Reserve Historical Society — the repository for all-things-Cleveland. WRHS, founded in 1857, is Cleveland’s attic. The auto showroom is the grand living room, with early-20th-century cars, some of which were built in Cleveland. There is a Jordan roadster and a Baker electric car. F. Scott Fitzgerald supposedly came up with the name for the golfer in The Great Gatsby – Jordan Baker — from those car names.

I used to drop by the WRHS library to do genealogy research. The only drawback was running into other genealogists who corralled me and talked about their fresh findings. I didn’t want to hear about Uncle Patrick from County Mayo and how he wound up in Kamm’s Corners. Did they want to hear about my grandma Anna, from Austria-Hungary, who lived in the Kinsman neighborhood? Nope.

Sean Martin, the associate curator for Jewish history at WRHS, likes my band and its memorabilia. I have given the society several boxes of expired Yiddishe Cup contracts, publicity photos and press kits. And Sean has given me a guided tour of the society’s back room, where my band’s stuff will reside. The back room is approximately the size of a Dollar Store, lined with shelves of cassette tapes, manila folders, newspaper clippings and VHS tapes.

I even came across the 1932 Glenville High School diploma of produce wholesaler Maury Feren, who used to write local newspaper columns, and do TV spots, about how to choose ripe fruits and vegetables. He said a cantaloupe is ripe when the stem has some give in it. Maury also published a pretty good memoir, Wheeling & Dealing in My World.

I said to Sean the curator, “Is there anything you won’t take here?”

“Funny you should ask,” Sean said. “I was in the basement of the old Fairmount Temple, where they had tapes of every Shabbat service from the 1970s. I don’t think we need every single one of them.”

“Is this like TikTok?” I said. “You hang onto stuff, and maybe a couple years from now, say, Maury Feren the produce guy blows up on social media, and you’re golden?”

“Something like that,” Sean said.

Maury Feren has 5.3 linear feet of archive boxes. Agudath B’nai Israel Congregation of Lorain, Ohio, has 5.8 linear feet — mostly dues cards and temple financial statements. Yiddishe Cup has 1.4 linear feet and counting. Maybe I’ll pay a slotting fee — like the big food companies do for premium shelf space at grocery stores — and I’ll gain an edge over the Maury Feren-types and high-school hall of famers. What price immortality?

 
My cousin Brian Kent is a beast. He didn’t get his beastliness from me — or my side of the family. Brian’s dad (my uncle Bob) married into the family and was a brawler. Uncle Bob had a bashed-up nose from fighting. Uncle Bob used to crash weddings in the 1940s to pick up girls, like at the Cleveland Jewish Center on East 105th Street and the Temple on the Heights on Mayfield Road in Cleveland Heights. Both high-class shuls. Bob, who was a proste yid from Kinsman Road, got around.

He joined the army. He claimed he wanted to fight for Israel in the Haganah after WWII, but that never happened. He wound up in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, in 1949, studying art. He ultimately became an art-education professor.

But we’re not here to talk about Bob. Brian the beast . . . Brian, his wife, Deborah, and I recently biked around Cleveland. On our bike trek, Brian biked down 12 steps at Case Western Reserve University. He biked down the steps, instead of walking the bike down the steps. Brian is no teenager. He’s 65. Later, Brian fell off his bike downtown and got right back up.

Brian Kent out west, 2025. (He lives in Connecticut)

I was the bike tour guide. Starting in Cleveland Heights, we headed toward Lake Erie, via the Cultural Gardens (East Boulevard). We planned on eating lunch at the Marina-at-55^th Street. We were going to get walleye. But the lakefront restaurant doesn’t exist. Ripped down. And I had checked the restaurant’s website, which said it was “open.” So we settled on the Siam Café at East 40th Street and St. Clair Avenue. We saw the former mayor in there. (Had to google his name. Frank Jackson.)

We biked to League Park in the Hough neighborhood. The baseball museum was closed. Hough looked pretty good, actually. Babe Ruth hit his 511th home run at League Park.

We biked past John Hay High, where Brian’s mother (my aunt Celeste Zalk) had gone to high school in the 1940s. Secretarial track.

Returning to the Heights, we stopped at a secret waterfall, which I can’t tell you about, and went to Shaker Square to see how run-down it is.

Brian said the highlights of the trip were the waterfall and the tasty lunch at the Siam Café. For me, the highlight was watching Brian bike down 12 stairs.

Beast.

 
Tokyo had Houston-level humidity and was 96 degrees. The water at the Tokyo swimming pool was at 32C, the lifeguard told me. I googled 32C; that was 90F! It was like swimming in miso soup. Plus, I had to wear a bathing cap, which made the miso even warmer. (You have to wear a cap in Japan.)

Then I found an indoor Tokyo pool, which was cooler, temp-wise. My son the musician sneaked me into his hotel, and on floor 15 there was a three-lane lap pool. No kiddie area. Just lanes. That’s class. I had to wear a bathing cap there, too.

—

I was visiting my daughter’s family in Chicago this summer. It was 93 degrees. No lockers at the Chicago pool. I changed into my swimsuit in the locker room, but I couldn’t store clothes or valuables. I had to take everything to the pool deck. I said to a lifeguard, “What — no lockers?” Alfred E. Neuman-style. The guard said nobody would steal anything.

A couple hundred people —  like in Tokyo — tried to chill in the heat. Nobody stole anything.

—

Cumberland Pool

Cumberland Pool in Cleveland Heights has 14 lap lanes.  Name a pool with more lap lanes. The city adds lanes and reduces the kiddie area, probably because Cleveland Heights is boomer central, with many elderly lap swimmers and lap joggers.

—

My go-to Cleveland swimming pool is the Cleveland Skating Club, which has six indoor lap lanes (and a skating rink). I never have to share a lane, year-round. That seclusion is worth the club dues. I don’t like playing rugby in the water.

Maybe I’ll install a one-person “endless” lap pool/tub where my dining room is. But I haven’t heard much, good or bad, about “endless” tubs.

One last thing . . . in Japan nobody wears flip-flops at pools. It’s all bare feet.

 
MetroHealth hospital said they’d pay me $200 — a portion of a tenant’s rent. The tenant was hospitalized and getting financial assistance.

But Metro didn’t pay, right off. They said they paid. And this was after I had filled out a couple hospital forms and mailed them in, and waited six weeks. Metro said they had sent the payment ACH. I didn’t get it, or maybe I did and was losing my mind.

I reached a Metro employee who said the payment wasn’t ACH, after all. It was a regular check mailed USPS. Metro said the check had cleared. When? Metro even read me the Metro check number. I was nuts, certified by a hospital.

And I didn’t have the check! No sign of it in my bank account or anywhere else. All this aggravation for $200?

A few weeks later Metro contacted me and said, “We’re going to reissue the check and mail it.” This, I assert, is an admission that Metro was nuts, and I wasn’t. (At least for the moment.)

—
Got the check.

—
I had an op-ed in the Cleveland Plain Dealer last week: “The bait-and-switch of our beautiful lakes.”

—
Yiddishe Cup plays TONIGHT (Wed. Aug 27) at 7 p.m. at the outdoor, covered Wain Pavilion on the grounds of Park Synagogue, 27500 Shaker Blvd., Pepper Pipes, Ohio. There are chairs. The concert is free. And if you want, you can donate to Magen David Adom (the Israel Red Cross) at the show.

 
I got an email with Michael “Moon” Stevens in the subject line. Moon is, or was, 82, and not too healthy. His obit?

Nope. Moon still “is.” Moon is the original Flint, Michigan, hipster.

Michael “Moon” Stevens grew up with John Sinclair, the well-known jazz aficionado and political nut-job from Flint. One of Moon’s relatives just contacted me about Moon. I know Moon through his sister, who lives in Cleveland.

For decades Moon was a union painter at the Los Angeles airport. He still maintains a cozy pad in L.A., where he’ll spin records for you. You are instructed to sit on his living room couch — in just the right corner — to optimally hear his jazz LPs.

Moon has an almost photographic memory for jazz facts. He gets most of his information from reading jazz bios and LP liner notes. He told me Sun Ra was a “congenital eunuch.” I didn’t know that. He said Joe Maneri was really fat, and Pharaoh Sanders foamed at the mouth and pounded his chest when he played.

When Moon was healthier, he visited Cleveland. One visit Moon was talking to me and his brother-in-law Lewis about Albert Ayler, Charlie Parker, Roland Kirk and Bill Evans. Moon covered all bases. Lewis — Moon’s bro-in-law — said Bill Evans was Jewish.

“How do you know Evans is Jewish?” I said to Lewis. “Do you wake up in the morning and wonder who’s Jewish, and who isn’t?” I do. But why would Lewis — a gentile — think about Jews nonstop?

“I grew up in Greenwich Village,” Lewis said. “New York was a very Jewish town when I grew up.”

“If somebody shoots somebody,” I said, “or if somebody wins the Nobel Prize, I wonder if the guy is Jewish. That’s my M.O.”

Moon said, “Bill Evans wasn’t Jewish. His father was Welsh and his mother was Russian Orthodox.”

Lewis corroborated this on Google.

Impressive, Moon.

—

Yiddishe Cup plays next Wednesday (Aug 27) at 7 p.m. at the outdoor, covered Wain Pavilion on the grounds of Park Synagogue, 27500 Shaker Blvd., Pepper Pipes, Ohio. There are chairs. The concert is free. And if you want, you can donate to Magen David Adom (the Israel Red Cross) at the show.

Was Dave Brubeck Jewish? Find out here  . . .

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iaWvixN_a9Q

 
There was a Playboy bunny in my high school. A future Playboy bunny. The bunny — now 75 —  recently called my daughter in Chicago. The former bunny is a gardener and landscaping consultant. When she saw my daughter’s area code (Cleveland / 216), the former bunny said she had been a party animal in high school —  Charles F. Brush High. My school. She said she didn’t know me.

I was no party animal.

The ex-bunny said she never paid for a drink until she was 30. My daughter said I had been a “nerd.” (Nerd wasn’t even a word in 1968! We were called “dips,” short for dipshits.)

After powwowing with my daughter, I got out my yearbook for the lowdown on the ex-bunny. The ex-bunny had been a blond Jewish majorette. Really?  And I didn’t even recognize her pic. (Hey, it was a big school.)

[Correction: she was no Jew. See postscript at bottom. The future bunny was just an above-average-intelligence, blond shikse. Boring!]

Also, there was a page in the yearbook of National Merit semi-finalists and commended scholars. I wasn’t on that page. The ex-bunny was. Whoa.

My friend Hersky wasn’t on the National Merit page either, and he got a 789 on the math SAT (before the math SAT was recentered, in 1995, which jacked up many math scores). Hersky specialized in numbers and Cliff Notes. He never read a book — and still hasn’t. I read some books — short ones, like The Time Machine and Goodbye Mr. Chips. (I started reading in college.)

In high school, I hung out with many commended and meritorious people, but not the future bunny. She must have been dating. I liked hanging out with people smarting than me. My crowd devoured the Comparative Guide to American Colleges, which we called the Bible. We learned about Reed, Pomona, and Rice. Rice’s freshman class had an incredibly high median math score. Emory was another good school. Swarthmore was harder to get into than Harvard.

Northwestern . . . I flew student-standby to Evanston for an interview. At the Cleveland airport, the ticket agent asked if I was an attaché because I didn’t have any baggage. I didn’t know what attache meant.

I expected some tough questions at Northwestern, maybe about the latest book I had read. I had read a book about Nazis — my favorite subject. The interviewer didn’t ask me anything about books. Instead, he extolled the university’s six-year medical program. (I was pre-med, like everybody else.) Northwestern smelled like dead fish from Lake Michigan. I could hardly breathe. Northwestern was a playboy school.

I flew to Johns Hopkins –a pre-med powerhouse. I talked about Nazis, and then the interviewer segued into mainstream material. He said Twain wrote Ethan Frome. No way! He didn’t catch me. Hopkins was isolated and there was no social life.

I’ll get back to the Playboy bunny eventually.

The admissions interviewer at Washington U. said I’d get in. Washington U. was easy to get into back then, just like Northwestern.

Meanwhile, back in Cleveland, at a cocktail party, my parents ran into a very savvy parent who said the best way to get into medical school was to attend a state school and get good grades. Go to Ohio State and get A’s, which was better than C’s at Harvard.

I wasn’t going to no Ohio state school, folks!! Ohio State was open-admissions then and took everybody. I hadn’t memorized the Comparative Guide to American Colleges to go to no Ohio state school.  Not even Miami U. of Ohio. As a consolation, my parents said I could try for Michigan, Michigan State or Wisconsin.

Michigan didn’t do interviews. Not their thing. Too big.

I got into Michigan early decision. The ex-bunny went to the University of Miami in Florida. More power to her, for getting out of Ohio. Maybe someday she and I will meet up and discuss how we didn’t know each other.

Charles F. Brush High was a big school. Six-hundred thirty-five kids. Yes, there were bigger graduating classes in Cleveland, but not many. And very few had bunnies-to-be.

—

Correction: A Brush alum — who had been to the future bunny’s house back in the day — wrote me: “No Judaica around. Mother and sister were blond and Protestant. No accents. Lived in a goyish neighborhood.” Oops.

I had presupposed the bunny was Jewish because of two things: when talking to my daughter, the bunny had mentioned a South Euclid Jewish neighborhood that she called “Chanukah Heights.”  So I figured the ex-bunny was from there. But she wasn’t. Also, the ex-bunny’s last name is vaguely Jewish — like Lewis, Brooks, or Cole.

 
I have this mishegas, where I detach uncanceled postage stamps from envelopes and reuse the stamps. I get a ton of mail, and some of it has uncanceled stamps.

Deeper: some of the uncanceled stamps are actually my own  — stamps I put on envelopes and, for whatever reason, I don’t use the envelope. Maybe I put a check in an envelope and then notice I’ve put the wrong check in. I rip open the envelope. The stamp is still good. (The envelope isn’t.)

I’ve been around stamps a while. I collected UN stamps and first-day covers. Some plate blocks. When I was in junior high, I took the bus downtown to the Manger Hotel for stamp shows. I was probably the youngest guy in there by about 50 years.

I collected stamps until college. My mother sent first-day covers to my dorm, and I had to tell her to stop. It was too embarrassing.

My stamps

I made $28.47 today, in a half hour, by rescuing uncanceled stamps from envelopes in my office. [39 “forever” stamps X 73 cents =$28.47]

I once had a tenant who used uncanceled stamps from the 1960s to send in her rent. I got 4-centers up until 1992, when she died.

I had the first stamps from Malaysia.

There was a stamp dealer, Mr. Stern, on Superior Road in Cleveland Heights. Alfred Stern: not a Jew. That shocked me. He was a German with a Christmas tree. My mom occasionally drove me to his apartment. He got me the Malaysian stamps.

I subscribed to Linn’s Stamp News from Sidney, Ohio. I had a friend — named Stamps, of all things — who collected coins. He subscribed to Coin World — also from Sidney, Ohio. Stamps collected brilliant uncirculated rolls of coins. I think his dad was into it, too. The Stamps were more like speculators. I was a collector. Still am.

 
I wish I had been in the military. I could have been in, but I didn’t go. I was against Vietnam. I learned quagmire — the word — from Walter Lippmann in Newsweek.

I can take orders and I don’t generally sass people, and I’ve never argued with cops or umpires.

Some of my high school classmates went into the service.  Some are on the war memorial on Green Road. By and large, these deceased guys weren’t in the college-prep classes.

One high school friend — a Jewish guy — went to Annapolis, though. He eventually became acting head of the FBI in Cleveland. I visited him at his office, and we brainstormed on ways to thwart terrorists. I didn’t have much to contribute.

When I was in elementary school, I sent away to the Air Force Academy for photos, and the academy mailed me an application.

I was mistaken for a military man only once, when I represented the Armed Forces at a sign-review meeting at Lakewood city hall. The Armed Forces rented a store from us. A sign-review board member said, “You walk like a military man.”

Atten-hut! Thank you.

The Armed Forces recruiting center housed the four major branches: Army, Navy, Marine and Air Force. The Army turned its basement area into a gym with punching bags and a Nautilus.

In 2008 the recruiters moved out and went across the street to a newer building, and left us with three ratty sofas, a rusty Nautilus, barbells, a mini-trampoline and a punching bag. For starters.

I wrote to the Army Corps of Engineers, Louisville, Kentucky, re U.S. lease W912QRM504000025:

There is 40 years’ worth of  junk in the basement: 27 chairs, a punching bag, American flag, scrap shelving, metal framing, boxes of “Army of One” promotional material, two bikes, six pieces of Nautilus-like weight equipment, barbells, a mini-trampoline . . .

A 1970s stereo system, file cabinet, and a lot of assorted paperwork, of which I’ve enclosed an invoice from 1991, just to give you a flavor for what’s down there.

The government paid for the hauling. That was my last dealing with the military. “Sgt. Stratton” never happened. Nor did “Private  Stratton.”  I feel somewhat guilty about that. (I know, typical ex-hippie revisionist thinking.)

 
I worked on the Hot Pockets campaign. I worked on Snickerdoodles. I did Crown condoms; they were big in Japan. I did Ovaltine. Ovaltine was big in Japan, too. I may be wrong about that. It’s been years since I worked in advertising.

I got into Japan early, thanks to my friend Mark Schilling (more on him below). In the 1970s Japan was taking over the world, and Mark and I were on it. Hondas were suddenly everywhere. First Honda motorcycles, then Honda cars. Then came Toyota, and Toyota was no toy.

Mark and I hitchhiked to California right after college, hanging around UCLA. We slept rent-free on a flat roof in Westwood. I had an orange mummy bag and Mark had a beat-up flannel Boy Scout bag. Mark was selling Christmas trees so he could get money to leave the USA. Nothing political. Simple wanderlust.

Mark Schilling, 1977

He got an offer to teach English in Barrancabermeja, Colombia. He looked into that, and “no way” — the heat, 100 degrees almost year-round. Then Mark got an offer to teach ESL in Japan.

And he’s been in Japan ever since. Fifty years.

At UCLA there was an acid-rock band called the United States of America. I never actually heard them, but the drummer, Craig Woodson, wound up playing a couple years with my klezmer band in Cleveland. Small world.

The United States of America was big — in an off-beat, avant-garde way — in Japan. Maybe because of the name “United States of America.” They made it onto the Japanese charts. The band lasted about year.

Meanwhile, in Tokyo, Mark began writing about all-things-Japanese: sumo, Pink Lady, yakuza films. He has made a career of that. Ask around, he’s the man — the heir to Donald Richie.

After California, I returned to Ohio and got into advertising (Snickerdoodles, blah, blah) thanks to a a friend’s dad who worked at the agency. Then my dad called, so to speak, and I went into his real estate biz. You don’t hang around Cleveland unless you have a family-biz connection.

My kids are in real estate. I brainwashed them. I drilled them: “Buy a double, live in it, the tenant pays 80 percent of your mortgage, you move out, then rent both halves of the house, and buy another house. Repeat as necessary.”

I wish I had gone with Mark to Japan in 1975.  I would have lasted 50 days max –not 50 years like Mark — but it would have been eye-opening, no doubt. Joan Jett. Remember her? She was big in Japan. The Ventures, too. Mark says, “Japan was like an annuity for them in their old age.” The Ventures toured Japan every year.

The Ventures are dead. And I’m not getting any younger. I should visit Japan.

. . . Done. Just bought a ticket!

—
fiction

 
The mayor’s assistant told us not to play any klezmer music — “nothing ethnic,” she said. Just American.

No klezmer? Why did the Orange Village (Ohio) mayor hire Yiddishe Cup for their city’s summer concert series?

This was 11 years ago. All forgiven now. By the way, Yiddishe Cup plays at the Cleveland Heights Rec Pavilion this Friday (July 18, 2025), 5:30-7:30 pm. Free. And well play whatever we want! (Part of the Coventry PEACE Pops event.)

At the Orange Village concert, our contract rider stipulated a fruit platter, bottled water and colas. A good gig, food-wise. But what were we going to play?

I said to the mayor’s assistant, “You don’t want to alienate anybody with ethnic music?”

“Exactly,” she said. “That’s the mayor’s thought.”

“How much non-ethnic music do you want?”

“All or mostly.”

“Can you give me a percentage?”

“Ninety percent American music,” she said.

Yiddishe Cup played “Dock of the Bay,” Motown, Beatles, “Hang on Sloopy” and “Old Time Rock And Roll.” A Chinese woman liked “My Girl” so much we played it twice.

I told the crowd that Yiddishe Cup started out as a deli — as opposed to a band — on Kinsman Road, then moved to Cedar Center, and ultimately wound up on the far East Side. I kept up that quirky patter throughout because “My Girl,” the second time through, wasn’t doing it for me. An Orange councilman asked where Yiddishe Cup had been at Cedar Center. I didn’t answer because I didn’t know. I should have said, “Between Abbey’s and Solomon’s.”

We snuck in “Miserlou,”a Greek tune. We did a Macedonian tune. We did an Israeli tune!

Think ethnic.

 
Violinist Yale Strom of San Diego led a terrific trad klezmer band at a recent Cain Park concert in Cleveland Heights. Then a Michigan bar band followed, playing klez-infused jazz improvisation. But neither was the highlight.

The highlight was when the emcee announced a raffle for a Glock gun. The audience — approximately 75  mostly elderly Jews — heard a Glock-shpiel.

Here (see below) is pretty much what the emcee said. [This is from a Facebook post, edited for clarity and length.] This is not fiction:

SAVE THE “CONCERT IN THE PARK” FUNDRAISER

July 13  1-5 pm
The Parma Armory
5301 Houserman Rd.
Parma OH

$40 per ticket. Each ticket gets you in the drawing for a chance to win a new Glock 9 mm pistol.

Only 50 tickets will be sold!!!

Shooting lanes open to ticket holders only.

Don’t have your own gun? You can rent one at the armory.

The Workmen’s Circle Educational Center of Ohio wants to thank you for your donation to help save the Concert in the Park.

To win the firearm you must pass the FFL background check.

If the winner fails the background check, another name will be drawn!!!

Thank you for your donation to help save the klezmer Concert in the Park.

 
My life flashed in front of me. I was walking to the bank. I was at Courtland Oval at Fairmount Boulevard, when a funeral cortege went by, and right off, I knew who was in the coffin and where it was going and where it had been. It was going to the same place I’m going some day. The coffin contained Jerry Zober (1948-2024). I knew him slightly. He was a shrink. I knew his sister, Muriel, better; we were in the same grade in school.

Jerry’s cortege proceeded from the Berkowitz Kumin Memorial Chapel in Cleveland Heights to Hillcrest cemetery in Bedford Heights. I knew all this because I had just read Jerry’s obit. The mourners’ cars had Berkowitz’s orange stick-on Jewish-flag ornaments.

I didn’t want to get too close to the cortege because I was feeling somewhat guilty about missing the funeral. I was busy that day! And I had never socialized with Jerry. Not even once. And I was flying to New York the next day and had to deal with stuff before leaving town.

Here’s the way I appraised the situation: at the funeral parlor — prior to the service — there would have been very little  time to schmooze with Muriel, Jerry’s sister. She would have been surrounded by relatives in the family-seating section. Who’s this guy Bert?

Shiva would have been great, but I couldn’t make it. I had last seen Muriel at her mom’s shiva 10 years ago. Muriel lives in Virginia. Also, I had been to the Berkowitz funeral parlor just a week prior for a friend’s aunt’s funeral. My friend lives in Israel and couldn’t make his aunt’s funeral so I repped him.

Give me a papal dispensation on Jerry’s funeral, please.

I sent Muriel an email saying I was sorry I couldn’t make the funeral and shiva. She wrote back, “Thanks. I was hoping to see you. Be well.”

If you ever see my coffin going down Fairmount Boulevard on its way to Hillcrest cemetery, considering waving. Or hide. If you didn’t know me very well, please have ambivalent feelings about the whole thing.

 
My wife tells me to never play for free. I do it anyway. Like the other day I played a luncheon for seniors; I did “Tumbalalaika,” “Moscow Nights,” “Fly Me to the Moon,” and klezmer. I was supposed to get a free lunch out of it, but the organizers ran out of food. Did I make a stink about that? No, I relished the slight. I went home, ate a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and mumbled about my temporary low status.

At the gig I answered my phone in the middle of a tune. A friend had called to brief me on his bronchitis. I said, “I’m playing a gig right now and probably shouldn’t talk.”

Why did I take the call? Because I was playing for free and not getting fed, so I drifted into unprofessional behavior.

“Never play for free” — Alice.

When I’m not fed at a freebie gig, I give the client what they paid for.

 
(This essay was in Sunday’s Cleveland Plain Dealer.)

The last time my father, Toby, ate out was at Wendy’s, on his way to a leukemia treatment in Columbus. My dad really liked Wendy’s. He thought he had a quasi-business relationship with the chain because he had almost invested in Wendy’s — headquartered in Columbus — before the chain got big. Almost is the key word. My dad’s near-miss with Wendy’s always topped my uncles’ near-miss get-rich-quick chronicles at Passover Seders.

I sat at Vintage India Restaurant on Detroit Avenue in Lakewood recently, thinking about my dad. My dad bought the building – not the restaurant, the building – decades ago. My family still owns the building. My dad died in 1986. I’m pretty sure Toby never ordered saag paneer in his life. Haagen Dazs, yes, but not saag paneer.

Vintage India is nothing special to look at. It has big plate-glass windows facing Detroit, and a laminate floor and drop-ceiling tiles. Bland decor, good food. The owners Ram and Shakuntla Lal do the cooking and their two adult children are servers. The son studies pre-med at Cleveland State University, and the daughter does nursing. The restaurant space, in previous iterations, was a medical-supply house, mattress store, office-supply house, furniture store and a video rental outlet called Cinema Transit. None of the businesses got the foot traffic of Vintage India. I counted more than 20 diners, plus a line of take-out customers, on a recent Saturday night.

Theodore “Toby” Stratton (1917-1986). 1985 photo.

My dad knew something about restaurants and food. His immigrant mother became a part-owner of Seiger’s deli at East 118th Street and Kinsman Road, and she also ran a mom-and-pop candy store further east on Kinsman Road. One of my dad’s childhood laments was that he couldn’t try out for the track team at John Adams High School because he had to work in the candy store after school.

“Financial security” was my dad’s watchword. He started early. One summer, he worked at Cedar Point, selling corned beef sandwiches on the beach. That’s the same beach where Notre Dame football coach Knute Rockne supposedly developed the forward pass. It would be great if Cedar Point put up a plaque for my dad, maybe something with wording like, “Toby’s favorite food was a good piece of rye bread.” Chocolate phosphates were a close second.

At Ohio State University, Toby lived in the Tower Club, a scholarship dorm in a wing of the stadium. It was a bunch of guys on cots in a big room. Toby majored in chemistry and made Phi Beta Kappa. After college, he had a lot of different jobs – none of them in chemistry. The chemical industry wasn’t hiring a lot of Jews when he graduated in 1938. He eventually wound up – 27 years later — a real estate investor. He put down 8% on the Vintage-India-Restaurant-to-be building in 1965 and “carried paper,” meaning he had first and second mortgages. He loved leverage.

If my dad is reincarnated, I hope he and I go to Vintage India. Toby will definitely appreciate the Lal family’s hustle and drive. I’ll advise my dad to stick to “1” on the 1-to-10 spiciness chart. The food at Vintage India food is hot, and my dad was a Wendy’s guy.

 
He said he was the last private-practice ENT in Northeast Ohio. I found him online — called him because my ear-wax appointment at the Cleveland Clinic was for six weeks out. Six weeks out for ear wax? Ridiculous.

I had already gone to the CVS Minute Clinic, in Chicago no less. I went to that CVS while visiting my daughter. I thought CVS’ exploration of my ear canals would be free because I’m old (Medicare), but I got billed $100. And they didn’t get the ear wax out.

The private-practice doc in Cleveland was Bert Brown. He said, “I hope you’re B-e-r-t, not B-u-r-t.” So we hit it off. He had a hook tool that got the wax out in about 3 seconds per ear.

The balls of wax were the size of blueberries. CVS had used water spray instead of a hook. Dr. Bert said I should come back every year to get cleaned. I asked his nurse for the ear-wax balls to take home but she had already pitched them. I should have at least taken a photo. My wife would have been interested.

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Free Father’s Day Concert: Yiddishe Cup plays 7 pm Sunday, June 15, at the Alma Theater at Cain Park, Cleveland Heights, Ohio.

 
You know Jim Sollisch. Or somebody like him. He’s that “gray-haired, middle-aged man in jeans and tennis shoes” (his words), hanging around Cleveland Heights. “If you ran into me on the street,” he noted, “you might guess that I was father or a husband. You might think I was Democrat or the owner of a foreign car.”

Sollisch, 67, has just published a collection of his personal essays, How Donating a Kidney Fixed my Jump Shot. How’s that for a catchy title? Sollisch is a copywriter at the Marcus Thomas ad agency and has written two Super Bowl commercials. Who else in Cleveland can say that? His side hustle is publishing op-eds in newspapers like the Plain Dealer, New York Times and Wall Street Journal. He has had hundreds of essays published the past several decades. He had an op-ed in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal about colonoscopies. [Link at end of this post.] For a while, in the 1990s, he read his essays aloud on National Public Radio’s “Morning Edition.”

Sollisch is well-rounded. He is feminine, marvelous and tough (to steal a phrase from poet Ted Berrigan).

Jim Sollisch

The feminine Sollisch . . . In high school, he badgered the administration at Cleveland Heights High into letting him take home economics instead of shop (1972). He likes to cook. He writes that he goes to various grocery stores up to four times a day to shop for fresh food. “And I was the only guy in my dorm [at Kent State] of 400 guys who ever used the kitchen. I became as powerful as the inmate with cigarettes.”

At 13 he wrote such poignant bar mitzvah thank-you notes that his recipients wrote Sollisch back, thanking him for his thank-you notes. His mother saved the notes. Nice.

The marvelous Sollisch. He donated a kidney to a co-worker. Who does that? A co-worker, not a relative. After giving up the kidney, the doctor told Sollisch he couldn’t take ibuprofen ever again, which he had regularly used to mask a sore hip. The hip — now unmedicated — started hurting so badly he got a new hip, and that improved his jump shot.

The tough Sollisch. He was scheduled to start at quarterback at Heights High his senior year, but at the last minute decided against it because he was only 5-8 and might get squashed. He stuck with basketball. He played basketball into his 60s.

The most interesting part, though, is Sollisch is a major-league kvetcher. He writes: “I hate bike riding . . ,  I hate summer camp . . . I hate fall, and there’s a fall phrase I detest: sweater weather.” Also, he doesn’t like bucket lists: “It’s not that I don’t like new experiences, I just like routine more. I like knowing where I’m going to have my coffee in the morning. I like not letting the grass grow too long.”

There you have it; Sollisch enjoys cutting his grass. He is the opposite of a down-and-out bohemian. Sollisch writes, “I was born here in Cleveland and grew up here, because that’s where my family lives. I own a home, I have a good job, plenty of friends [including me, writing this], and every Thanksgiving I play in the annual Turkey Bowl game on the football field I played on in junior high.” (One of Sollisch’s Turkey Bowl teammates was Steve Presser of Big Fun fame. Small world — the Heights.)

Sollisch’s essays have appeared in publications from Anchorage, Alaska, to Japan, and yet he’s Full Cleveland. He sticks to the unglamorous, to the quotidian. He writes, “I don’t live large. I get most of my clothes at thrift stores. My cat is 9 years old. I don’t dine at pricey restaurants. But I’ll tell you one extravagance I’m not willing to give up: yawning. I like to get up in the morning and yawn, really stretch my arms.”

Sollisch doesn’t write much about his advertising job, but I bet he could make that interesting. Maybe he’s waiting until he retires. Sollisch ponders what might have happened if he hadn’t gone into the ad biz. “I wonder what I might have written, what ideas I might not have censored, what risky paths I might have taken.” In other words, what if Sollisch had gone full-bore literary? Would he have deserted us for  a cabin in Maine? Doubt it. He would have been an adjunct prof at John Carroll, I think.

Sollisch’s book is a 166-page collection of concise, well-written essays about a Heights man who likes to cook and hang out with his wife, children and grandchildren, and who hates certain things. He’s writing about life. Make that “life in the Heights” — although there is one essay about North Carolina, which he didn’t like.

If you want to know what your neighbor is up to, read this book.

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Here’s a link (no paywall) to Sollisch’s op-ed in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal.

On Sunday, June 22, Sollisch gives a reading at Township Hall, 83 Main Street, Chagrin Falls, Ohio, 3-5 pm. Sponsored by Fireside Books.

How Donating a Kidney Fixed my Jump Shot is available at Cleveland-area bookstores and online at Amazon.

This review appeared, slightly abbreviated, in the June 2025 Heights Observer.

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Yiddishe Cup plays a free concert on Father’s Day at Cain Park, Cleveland Heights, 7 pm Sun. June 15. Alma Theater.