<\/p>\n
Downtown Detroit has a lot of <\/strong>detour<\/span><\/span> <\/strong><\/span>signs.\u00a0 Just when you think you’re heading back to Ohio, you’re not.\u00a0 You’re on your way to Detroit Metro airport and points west.<\/p>\n Don’t play for peanuts in Detroit.\u00a0 You’ll feel like a fool if you’re lost and underpaid at two in the morning.<\/p>\n In Yiddishe Cup’s van, each musician has an assigned role. Our drummer is in charge of windshield fluid levels.\u00a0 He’s big on that.\u00a0 Our dance leader supplies the bottled water. Our keyboard player loads the van; he knows the secret order of the gear.\u00a0 We like to watch.<\/p>\n Van life smells.\u00a0 It reeks of six guys in a metal container, topped with a cherry-scented spray, courtesy of the van rental company.<\/p>\n One Yiddishe Cup musician plays<\/strong><\/span> his iPod so loudly there is aural seepage.\u00a0\u00a0Not everybody is into Bob Dylan’s basement tapes.\u00a0 The icing: scents from Krispy Kremes and Cinnabuns.\u00a0 Our driver eats that stuff like he’s on death row.<\/p>\n The bandleader’s job is to monitor the musicians’ word output.\u00a0 Everyone has a certain quota of words for the day, and after he has used that, he should shut up and read, according to the van guard.<\/p>\n Luckily, nobody in Yiddishe Cup is a motor mouth.\u00a0 Really, nobody wants to hear about your stock portfolio, your computer, your illness, your day-job boss, for too long.\u00a0 Only exceed your word quota for safety reasons, like if the driver might fall asleep from drowsiness.<\/p>\n That, unfortunately, is a possibility. You know how boring it is to drive I-71 to Columbus, or the Ohio Turnpike to Detroit?<\/p>\n Little known fact: you can get lox and bagel at milepost 100 on the Ohio Turnpike.<\/p>\n Don’t.<\/p>\n Yiddishe Cup’s worst milepost ever:<\/strong><\/span> 213, on I-71 near Medina, Ohio.\u00a0 We had a flat tire and waited for a tow truck at 3 a.m.\u00a0 Our drummer kept repeating, “Here comes a truck with lights on top.”<\/p>\n I said, “Most trucks have lights.”<\/p>\n The tow truck was a heavy-duty model — especially equipped for jacking up vans — and it arrived very late.<\/p>\n I had a lot of time to replay our night’s gig, a Columbus bat mitzvah.\u00a0 After the hora, the mom had said, “It wasn’t a freylekhs<\/em>!” \u00a0[Hora.] And I had said, “It wasn’t Latin music!”\u00a0 Apparently, she had wanted to be lifted in a chair, and I had cut the music before.\u00a0 I wasn’t clairvoyant. <\/p>\n Bat mitzvah moms don’t always goes up on chairs. \u00a0Maybe half the time. Downtown Detroit has a lot of detour signs.\u00a0 Just when you think you’re heading back to Ohio, you’re not.\u00a0 You’re on your way to Detroit Metro airport and points west. Don’t play for peanuts in Detroit.\u00a0 You’ll feel like a fool if you’re lost and underpaid at two in the morning. In Yiddishe Cup’s van, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1057","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-on-the-road"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1057","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1057"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1057\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8838,"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1057\/revisions\/8838"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1057"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1057"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1057"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n—<\/span>
\n1 of 2 posts for 11\/25\/09<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"