{"id":1380,"date":"2010-04-14T08:00:47","date_gmt":"2010-04-14T12:00:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/?p=1380"},"modified":"2012-03-26T17:51:41","modified_gmt":"2012-03-26T21:51:41","slug":"life-cycling","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/2010\/04\/14\/life-cycling\/","title":{"rendered":"THE LIFE CYCLE DIARIES"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>\n

1. CHEERS FOR “L’CHAIM”<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

I had a funeral gig, or thought I did.\u00a0 The deceased, Sid Elsner, had booked me years prior.\u00a0 Sid wanted a New Orleans-style, jazz-klezmer element at his funeral.\u00a0 Not a kosher concept, but neither was Sid.\u00a0 [Goys<\/em>: Jews don’t often have music at funerals.]<\/p>\n

When Sid died, none of his adult children mentioned music, so I didn’t play.<\/p>\n

At the gravesite, I got a recipe for Sid’s brisket.\u00a0 His oldest son was passing out the secret list of ingredients (chili sauce, onions).<\/p>\n

Food works. <\/strong><\/span> That’s why there are shiva <\/em>(mourning) meals.<\/p>\n

A musician in Yiddishe Cup has attended only one funeral.\u00a0 He has been to hundreds of weddings and one funeral. Lucky.<\/p>\n

My mother’s favorite song was “Shenandoah,” which we sang it at her stone setting but not at her funeral.<\/p>\n

My dad didn’t have a favorite tune.<\/p>\n

Yiddishe Cup’s singer, Irwin Weinberger,<\/a> wants Yiddishe Cup to play at his funeral.\u00a0 I hope I can oblige.<\/p>\n

After a 2000 <\/strong><\/span>Yiddishe Cup gig, I stopped at my father’s grave with my youngest son, who placed an old clarinet reed on my dad’s headstone.\u00a0 My son had just played his first paying gig, on drums, with Yiddishe Cup.\u00a0 I wanted to let my father know I was still around, still pushing the ball — cutting the grass, raising a family, starting a klezmer dynasty.\u00a0 That last notion — the klezmer dynasty — would have flummoxed Toby, my father.\u00a0 The last time Toby had heard me play I was a Cannonball Adderley wannabe.<\/p>\n

. . . Here’s some advice for Jewish dads doing toasts at weddings: make your speech funereal. Pretend you’re updating your dead father, even if he’s alive.\u00a0 Use flashbacks and talk about your kid’s personality quirks.\u00a0 Stay on the high road; let the maid of honor do the weird stuff.\u00a0 And end with “L’chaim,” even if you’ve never said it before.\u00a0 “Cheers” from a Jew is a big turn off.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

2. TOWER OF POWER<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

It’s unnerving when the bride ditches her own wedding.\u00a0 She gets the flu for example, or a headache or swollen ankle, and has to lie down for a few hours.\u00a0 Misses the whole party.\u00a0 That marriage may not last.<\/p>\n

Worse: the mom dies during the “Chicken Dance.”\u00a0 That happened.\u00a0 Not at my gig, but at one my video guy was at.<\/p>\n

Did my video guy get it on tape?\u00a0 I don’t know.\u00a0 The video guy died on me.\u00a0 Not at my gig, but slowly, over months.<\/p>\n

He didn’t move around<\/strong><\/span> much; he had a stationary video rack.\u00a0 He just stood by his rack, which I called the Tower of Power, and barely budged the whole night.\u00a0 In his final days, he really bugged me.\u00a0 For instance, when Yiddishe Cup would stroll table-to-table taking requests, like klezmer-achis, he would tell me which tables to go to.\u00a0 “Can you do the head table next?” he would ask.<\/p>\n

I didn’t know he was that sick.\u00a0 “Why?” I said.<\/p>\n

“Because I want to sit down,” he said.<\/p>\n

I said no.\u00a0 The head table was nowhere near us.\u00a0 We had a traffic pattern to maintain.<\/p>\n

He said, “I’ll remember this when you want a favor.”<\/p>\n

Then he died.<\/p>\n

—<\/span><\/p>\n

Yiddishe\u00a0 Cup plays Mon. April 19, 6:35 p.m., for the community-wide Yom Ha’atzmaut (Israel Independence Day) celebration<\/a> at B’nai Jeshurun Cong., Cleveland.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

1. CHEERS FOR “L’CHAIM” I had a funeral gig, or thought I did.\u00a0 The deceased, Sid Elsner, had booked me years prior.\u00a0 Sid wanted a New Orleans-style, jazz-klezmer element at his funeral.\u00a0 Not a kosher concept, but neither was Sid.\u00a0 [Goys: Jews don’t often have music at funerals.] When Sid died, none of his adult […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1380","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-klezmer","category-toby-stratton"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1380","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=1380"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1380\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8793,"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1380\/revisions\/8793"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1380"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1380"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1380"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}