<\/p>\n
My dentist thinks<\/strong><\/span> he is Larry David.\u00a0 When he looks at my X-rays, he shouts, “You bastard, you don’t have any cavities!”<\/p>\n My friend Mike, a retired businessman, thinks he is Larry David.\u00a0 Mike has lived in Cleveland 35 years, but still considers himself a New Yorker.\u00a0 “I don’t want to lose my standards,” he says when we eat out.\u00a0 Mike is tough on bread — for starters.\u00a0 Then it’s on to water: “What?\u00a0 No Pellegrino?”<\/p>\n I’m Larry David.<\/p>\n A lot of middle-aged Jewish men think they’re Larry David.<\/p>\n I used to listen<\/strong><\/span> to comedy records at Harvey Pekar’s apartment.\u00a0 Harvey had all of Bob and Ray, Lenny Bruce, and even Arnold Stang, the actor who did the Chunky commercials.\u00a0 I could only listen to jazz for so long at Harvey’s.<\/p>\n Yiddishe Cup has gigged with a couple comedians.\u00a0 The comics do bits on dieting and airport travel.\u00a0 Frum <\/em>(religiously observant) comedians even do riffs on kosher food.\u00a0 Like “We had a power outage at our house and lost $100 worth of kosher meat — two chickens and a pound of hamburger.”<\/p>\n I could do that.\u00a0 Every Jewish guy thinks he can do that.<\/p>\n Seder is the training ground for Jewish comedians.\u00a0 I had a relative who thought he was Phil Silvers.\u00a0 Ruined everything at Seder.\u00a0 I like a serious Seder.\u00a0 Curb the jokes about matzo and constipation.<\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n My last close relative<\/strong><\/span> left Cleveland in 2001.\u00a0 Now my Seders are with friends.<\/p>\n My relatives went to warmer places or died.<\/p>\n I hope some of my sun-worshipping, Sunbelt relatives come back.\u00a0 And if they want a sip of fresh water, that’ll cost five dollars.\u00a0 That’s the Great Lakes’ big hope: the rest of the country runs out of water.<\/p>\n I’m in about two traffic jams a year in Cleveland.\u00a0 I would prefer five.\u00a0 I don’t relish the horrible traffic of Chicago or Washington, but just a few more tie-ups in Cleveland would be nice.<\/p>\n In the 1970s<\/strong><\/span> Clevelanders first began imagining the whole town could go under.\u00a0 T-shirts were silk-screened: “Cleveland: You’ve Got to be Tough.” <\/p>\n A musician in Milwaukee wrote a song called “Thank God This Isn’t Cleveland.”\u00a0\u00a0 [Thanks to former Milwaukeean Andrew Muchin for that info.]<\/p>\n Some Clevelanders never got over the trauma of the 1970s.\u00a0 I know Clevelanders who vacation in Cape Cod; they’re instructed by the national media to vacation very far from the Midwest.\u00a0 They wait an hour for ice cream on Cape Cod.\u00a0 I biked around Nantucket in 1979 and it was crowded then<\/em>.<\/p>\n Some of the best scenery in America is the bike path from Gambier to Coshocton, Ohio.\u00a0 Rolling farm country, horses, sheep, cows, pigs and Amish buggies.<\/p>\n But some Midwesterners need to see the ocean.\u00a0 They drive all day to the Carolina shore.\u00a0 For what?\u00a0 Lake Erie has beaches, waves, fat people and miniature golf.\u00a0 Check out Geneva on-the-Lake.<\/p>\n Seder with friends . . .<\/strong><\/span> It’s not the same as with Aunt Bernice, Cousin Howard, and the rest of the gang at the old Seder table.<\/p>\n I live three miles from where I was born.\u00a0 I’m always running into things that don’t exist anymore.<\/p>\n Is it unusual for a college-educated Jewish baby boomer to live so close to where he was born?<\/p>\n Yes.<\/p>\n —<\/p>\n [To my three goys: Pesach<\/em>, in the post title, is Hebrew for Passover<\/em>.]<\/p>\n —<\/span> My dentist thinks he is Larry David.\u00a0 When he looks at my X-rays, he shouts, “You bastard, you don’t have any cavities!” My friend Mike, a retired businessman, thinks he is Larry David.\u00a0 Mike has lived in Cleveland 35 years, but still considers himself a New Yorker.\u00a0 “I don’t want to lose my standards,” he […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1342","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-coming-of-age","category-pekar"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1342","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=1342"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1342\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9195,"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1342\/revisions\/9195"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1342"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1342"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1342"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nSee the “Driving Mr. Klezmer”<\/a> show tonight (Wed. March 24) at the Malt Shop (Maltz Museum<\/a>), Beachwood, Ohio.\u00a0 7 p.m.\u00a0 Features the mail-fraud team of\u00a0 Stratton & Douglass.<\/span>
\n—<\/span>
\nJack Stratton<\/a>, drums, and\u00a0 Bert Stratton, clarinet, are featured in the movie “First Voice Ohio” at the Cleveland International Film Festival<\/a> Fri. March 26, 2:15 p.m.<\/span>
\n—<\/span>
\nSee Yiddishe Cup Sat. March 27, 9 p.m., at COW, the College of Wooster<\/a> (Ohio).<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"