{"id":34519,"date":"2026-07-28T10:25:43","date_gmt":"2026-07-28T14:25:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/?p=34519"},"modified":"2026-07-28T10:25:43","modified_gmt":"2026-07-28T14:25:43","slug":"take-me-back-to-pittsburgh","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/2026\/07\/28\/take-me-back-to-pittsburgh\/","title":{"rendered":"TAKE ME BACK TO PITTSBURGH"},"content":{"rendered":"

 
\nYiddishe Cup takes a lot of breaks. Why kill ourselves; we aren\u2019t kids. Some bands — Hungarian bands, say — play their asses off. They just keep on playing. Kill themselves. I\u2019ve injured myself too many times. Tendinitis, in particular.<\/p>\n

The cocktail hour is \u201cwallpaper music.\u201d It’s ambience; nobody is paying attention to the music. And the dinner hour, don\u2019t go full-bore.<\/p>\n

But last month we went full-bore. We played an hour and forty minutes without a break at the\u00a0 national convention on the Cantors Assembly in Pittsburgh. Two-hundred cantors. They knew every tune (Jewish and American) we played, and they sang along to half of it, and some of the cantors jumped on stage (invited) and sang with us. They partied very hard. Many of the cantors were traveling without spouses, and since it was a convention, it got tres<\/em> loose. The hazzonim<\/em> were all staying at the party-site hotel (Omni William Penn), so the cantors didn’t have to drive anywhere. They had nothing to do but party.<\/p>\n

When we stopped playing, the cantors kept on boogy-ing until the hotel turned the lights off in the ballroom. The cantors then went into the hallway, outside the ballroom, and sang a capella.<\/p>\n

Two attendees said they had hired Yiddishe Cup for weddings back in the day. A cantor from Plano,Texas, and a guy from New York.<\/p>\n

At a more-common Yiddishe Cup party gig, I usually get a bit antsy, like Where\u2019s my water? Or my left ear itches. But in Pittsburgh, the band and I were in the zone for the entire party. Sarah Myerson, a cantor and dance leader from New York, did a stupdenous, straight-ahead, no-tricks bottle dance. (The trick is you fill the bottle one-third full. You get a lower center of gravity, which helps.)<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  Yiddishe Cup takes a lot of breaks. Why kill ourselves; we aren\u2019t kids. Some bands — Hungarian bands, say — play their asses off. They just keep on playing. Kill themselves. I\u2019ve injured myself too many times. Tendinitis, in particular. The cocktail hour is \u201cwallpaper music.\u201d It’s ambience; nobody is paying attention to the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-34519","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-miscellaneous"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34519","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=34519"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34519\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":34561,"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34519\/revisions\/34561"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34519"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34519"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34519"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}