{"id":3636,"date":"2011-03-04T08:00:09","date_gmt":"2011-03-04T12:00:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/?p=3636"},"modified":"2012-03-31T17:54:26","modified_gmt":"2012-03-31T21:54:26","slug":"five-uneasy-pieces","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/2011\/03\/04\/five-uneasy-pieces\/","title":{"rendered":"FIVE UNEASY PIECES"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>\n

1. My father <\/strong><\/span>had a game idea Let’s Blow Up the World.\u00a0 I apportioned the megaton bomb ratings to various countries.\u00a0 What kind of bomb did Paraguay deserve? \u00a0An M-80 firecracker?\u00a0 Let’s Blow Up the World never made it past “high concept.”<\/p>\n

\"blow-up1\"<\/p>\n

2. Alan Douglass,<\/strong><\/span> Yiddishe Cup’s keyboard player, was a klezmer-revival pioneer.\u00a0 He could have called klezmer “anchovy pear music” in Cleveland in the 1980s and people would have believed him.\"pioneer\" Alan let other musicians start the klez bands.\u00a0 These others musicians got the extra money for being bandleaders.\u00a0 What can a gentile do?\u00a0 It wouldn’t have looked right for a goy — Alan — to lead a klez band.<\/p>\n

\"creeak\"3. Len Gold,<\/strong><\/span> a Cleveland ad man, wanted to make a Yiddishe Cup exercise video, Stretch ‘n’ Kvetch<\/em>, to sell at temple gift shops.\u00a0 Never happened.<\/p>\n

4. Don Friedman,<\/strong><\/span> Yiddishe Cup’s drummer, was on What’s My Line <\/em>in 1966.<\/em> Don’s line (job) was testing drums for the Rogers Drum Co. in Cleveland.\u00a0 (He was a drum tester, not a rum tester.)\u00a0 Don probably could have had several more minutes of fame if he had asked Bennett Cerf to explain his name.<\/p>\n

\"Don

Don Friedman (L) with host John Daly<\/p><\/div>\n

—
\n5. Yiddishe Cup<\/strong><\/span> had a gig lined up for Fuerth, Germany, but the klezmer festival organizers there changed directors, or something, and we got canned.\u00a0 I heard years later, through the klez grapevine, that Yiddishe Cup will never play Fuerth.\u00a0 “They don’t like you!”\u00a0 That’s the word on K Street.<\/p>\n

Why don’t they like us? Maybe because I wrote the festival committee: “For three years we think — with good reason — we will be playing a concert in Germany.\u00a0 Then, boom, it all goes kaput!”\u00a0 I ended with a string of rage: “unscrupulous,” “shameful” and “dirty.”\u00a0 I did not play the race card.\u00a0 I did not call the klez-festival organizers anti-Semites.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

1. My father had a game idea Let’s Blow Up the World.\u00a0 I apportioned the megaton bomb ratings to various countries.\u00a0 What kind of bomb did Paraguay deserve? \u00a0An M-80 firecracker?\u00a0 Let’s Blow Up the World never made it past “high concept.” 2. Alan Douglass, Yiddishe Cup’s keyboard player, was a klezmer-revival pioneer.\u00a0 He could […]<\/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-3636","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\/3636","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=3636"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3636\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9003,"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3636\/revisions\/9003"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3636"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3636"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3636"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}