Category — Miscellaneous

 
Two Jews, three opinions . . .

Warfare. The cops were called. [This was at the 2022 Yiddish concert at Cain Park, Cleveland Heights.] The concert chairman, who had a quite a temper, asked the Cleveland Heights police to eject a Workmen’s Circle (WC) person for passing out WC literature at a card table at the show. (WC is a Jewish fraternal organization.)

The tightly wound chairman was the head of a group called the Yiddish Concert in the Park (YCIP) committee, an offshoot delegation of the Workmen’s Circle. Farshtey?

The YCIP chairman was annoyed with the WC. It appeared he wanted total control of the show. It was a pishing contest. The police escorted the Workmen’s Circle pamphleteer out.

Can’t we Jews get along?

(Don’t answer that.)

Back in pre-history (the 1980-1990s), the annual free Cain Park Yiddish concert attracted up to 2,000 people. Acts included The Klezmatics, Pharaoh’s Daughter, the Klezmer Conservatory Band, Bruce Adler and Chava Alberstein.

Then the Yiddish-speaking audience dwindled. The target audience pretty much died out. Concert attendance was down to about 400 attendees typically, in the 2010s.

Today: The YCIP and the WC (Cleveland branch) don’t exist. The WC’s website shows nothing much has happened there in the past several years. The YCIP hasn’t met in four years. Gornisht.

I’m a former member of both the YCIP and the WC. People sometimes ask me, “What’s going on with the Yiddish concert at Cain Park? I miss it.” I explain there’s a rump group of five people who use the name Workmen’s Circle, and these folks have self-funded the shows for the past two years. Funded it small-time. A couple grand, most. Not enough dinero to bring in high-quality talent.

Cain Park, which is a city-owned venue, has no time, or the resources, to deal with these nuances. Cain Park doesn’t know Yiddish from spinach. And lately Cain Park has run through two general managers and an interim manager. Aside: another established entity seemingly in the dark about all this is the Cleveland Jewish News, which aggressively promotes the WC’s low-rent shows, maybe because the CJN makes money by selling ads for printed concert programs.

In 2023 I met with the then-chief financial officer of the Jewish Federation of Cleveland, and he told me he was fed up with the squabbling committees and “we’re not giving another dime [to underwrite the concert] until we see accounting reconciliations and a financial statement.”

I remember when Yiddishist Henry Green donated approximately $50,000 to the concert fund. He had escaped Europe and started a business in Bolivia, made some dough, and then moved to Cleveland. He died in 1998.

The concert endowment now has more than $150,000, manged by the Jewish Federation of Cleveland. For the record, Henry’s son, Andy, wrote to the Federation in 2023 and said he wanted the dough to go to the YCIP, not the WC. Andy died last year.

Shortly after the cops visited Cain Park, I contacted a rump WC person. He said he wanted to revive the concert in a big way. He had a very talented, very well-known performer in mind. Top secret.

“Come on, tell me who you’re thinking of. I’m a musician,” I said. “Come on.”

“Bette Midler.”

What? “How do you get to Bette Midler?” I said.

“Somebody knows her. She was in Workmen’s Circle.”

Does Midler she still perform? Does she still breathe? Does she know any Yiddish? Would she work for less than rock-star gelt?

[Midler grew up in Hawaii, where which never had a Workmen’s Circle branch.]

I called the Cain Park general manager and said, “We’re not able to attract a national act because the Yiddish Concert in the Park committee [YCIP] doesn’t exist and neither does the Workmen’s Circle.”

This was news to the park manager. He said people occasionally asked him, too, what’s up with the Yiddish concert. (This manager got fired from Cain Park after a year.)

Last year: The rump WC group produced a show which attracted approximately 75 people. The craziest part of the concert, for me, was when the WC raffled off a Glock gun at intermission.

This year: The Cleveland Jewish News just published a recap of the Aug. 23, 2026, show. Headline:

‘Phenomenal’ annual Yiddish Concert draws over 400 fans.”  

 
I learned “Danny Boy” to play in Ireland, but nobody wanted to hear it there. I also learned “Irish Washerwoman,” another non-hit.

Yesterday I played  “Danny Boy” at a nursing home in Cleveland. Big success. My friend Irwin says the tune was written by a Jew. Not true, Itchie. An Englishman wrote it. But a lot of Jews and Tin Pan Alley types helped popularize it.

Irwin plays Irish music on occasion. I once saw him jamming at Horseshoe Lake with an Irish trad-music group. I’m not very knowledgeable about Irish music, although I certainly appreciate the fact the lyrics are in English and not, say, Romanian.

I busked in Ireland last month. I was at a public park in the middle of nowhere: County Wicklow. There was a food-truck area, featuring Blaa Burger and Mr. Whippy soft-serve ice cream. There were picnic tables. I often busk on holidays to meet people. The busking is most fun if people are seated and somewhat trapped. If they’re walking by on their way to some place else, that’s tougher. These folks were trapped, seated at tables, chomping on Blaa Burgers.

When I asked an Irishman if he knew “Danny Boy,” he said no. A second Irishman knew the tune; he had spent 10 years in the US as a CPA.

My swing tunes went over best. Also, a klezmer tune for Germans tourists. There were many teenagers at the park. I told them, “I don’t play for anybody under 19.” They were glad. A Brazilian wanted “Ipanema.”

I wore a chai necklace — a gift from former Yiddishe Cup dance leader Danny Ducoff.  In Cleveland, Danny had said if I got punched by an antisemite in Ireland, I should compliment the assailant on his knowledge of Hebrew.

Only one person in Ireland reacted to my necklace — a Russian tourist, who ripped open his shirt to reveal a Star of David pendant. The Russian was on vacation. I didn’t know Russians vacationed in the West. He told me he was one-eighth Jewish. One of his great-grandfathers had been Jewish. The Russian was Mark, and I went on and on about how Jewish “Marks”  in America, at least in the 1950s, were usually “Marc.” I should have asked Mark more about Russia, and talked less about “Marc.”

“Danny Boy” — I like it. The melody. I also like Andy Statman’s “Song of Redemption,” which sounds Irish to me. All major-key pentatonic.

If you’re ever in Ireland and want to jam with the trad bands there, you should learn up-to-date tunes. Not 1920s-era Irish-American classics like “Danny Boy.”

Everybody knows a Danny. At yesterday’s nursing home gig, at least four people said they were related to a Danny. I bet even Danny Ducoff has a Danny relative.

Danny Ducoff (w/ red maracas), 2004

—

Yiddishe Cup  plays a free concert 2:30 pm this SUN. (Aug. 30) at the Coventry PEACE Park stage, which is at the corner of Coventry Road and Euclid Heights Boulevard in Cleveland Heights. The concert is part of the Heights Music Hop. Bring a blanket or a chair.

 
A Cleveland Jewish News columnist regularly writes self-help pieces about how to enjoy life. Like go fly a kite, chase fireflies, take a walk. All good ideas. But the articles make me feel guilty because I’m usually sitting in a La-Z-Boy reading the columns.

How many times can I fly a kite?

I don’t envy the columnist. It’s hard to write a weekly column. And lately there’s a somewhat-new Cleveland Plain Dealer writer who chronicles her robust personal life. She joined an adult swim team. She ate a funnel cake with her kids. She played USTA tennis.

I can’t argue with any of that. Instead, I’ll guilt-trip you . . .

This month I rode my bike to Chagrin Falls and back, 24 miles. I didn’t walk up the Shaker Boulevard hill. I’ve been doing this ride annually for 48 years, and I’ve been riding the same bike — a 10-speed Kabuki Super Light, which isn’t super light. I bought the bike at Heights Furniture & Toy for $169 in 1978. The Super Light is older than my kids and my marriage.

Does that bike trip makes you feel bad? If so, now you know how I feel reading the other writers.

—

Yidd Cup concert tomorrow (Thurs. Aug. 20), 7:30 pm, at the Wain Pavilion, Park Synagogue, 27500 Shaker Blvd., Pepper Pipes, Ohio. Free. The Wain Pavilion is an outdoor, covered venue, like Blossom Music Center, but smaller. Seats are provided. Donations encouraged to Magen David Adom.

 
Because I run a bar mitzvah think tank, I get calls from DJs and party planners. I sit and think, and give advice. I’m also a “fellow” at the Hudson Institute in Washington. I have office space there, which I rarely use. Hudson Institute fellow. That has a nice ring to it, but no money. I often get calls from reporters about Jewish issues, like Israel, klezmer and American Jewry. Why do they call me? Because I deliver  punchy, down-home Midwest takes on the Mideast. Sometimes I have to stay up till 3 am for my live TV interviews. The interviewer says, “Please hang on, Mr. Stratton,” and I hang on and lose sleep — all for world Jewry.

But my livelihood is the bar mitzvah thing. I supply clients — mostly DJs, like I said — with explosives, lyrics and games. Some of my games are free, just to build web traffic. For instance, take my humiliation game; the bar mitzvah boy stands on the dance floor surrounded by searing sterno cans. The guests throw napkins at him.

My top-selling games are Twine Fun, Narcissism Express, Beach Sand Saturation, Toxic Candy and Trunk-like Bodies. I have Jewish-themed games, too. The kids wear bottle caps on their heads, and the last kid to lose his “yarmulke,” wins. Lots of body contact. But my Jewish games’ sales are off, maybe because of Netanyahu, which is Hebrew for Idon’tlikeJews. Maybe Obama will become prime minister in October and we’ll all start singing “Salaam” again. Od yavo shalom aleinu.

Back to reality . . . My best-selling game is Trash Floating in the Punch Bowl. We throw chicken bones, children’s books from the centerpieces, and lipstick-smeared plastic cups into the punch bowl. Kids reach in and fish for prizes. It’s ecological.

I strained my back at a gig once. Bingo, a new game — the Grandpa Shuffle. Kids walk around like oldsters and mutter creative Yiddish curses. It’s astonishing to see teenagers limp and spew “Zol er krenken un gedenken.” (Let him suffer and remember.)

I carry classic games, too: laughing gas, toilet slime kits, photo booths, giant inflatables and partisans.

My “fellow” think-tank buddies are some of my best customers.

“Fellow” Itchie Weinberger with his “Toilet Slime” kit.

—

Yiddishe Cup plays two free concerts this month:

7:30 pm Thurs., Aug. 20, at the outdoor, covered Wain Pavilion at Park Synagogue, 27500 Shaker Blvd, Pepper Pipes, Ohio. Donations encouraged to Magen David Adom. Seating provided.

2:30 pm Sun, Aug. 30. Coventry PEACE Park, Cleveland Heights, Ohio. Free. Bring a chair or blanket. The concert is part of the Heights Music Hop.

 
I might go to shul this Saturday because I have a band-aid on my nose. I have a fond recollection of old guys in shul with band-aids on their heads. Old guys with skin cancer, biopsy scars, MOHs surgeries, whatever. When I was younger, I’d see a lot of men with band-aids on their domes or noses or ears, and I’d think these guys are old.

A spot on my nose was biopsied the other day. Gotta wear the band-aid. The bump will probably be cancerous. Why not?  Mild skin cancers (like basal cell) go with the territory for old Ashkenazi Jews. At least Litvaks.

I’m wondering what the kiddish meal will be. Sometimes the meals are insubstantial. But I’m thinking this will be good. And I really need to show off my band-aid.

Back from shul . . . Blintzes and borscht, salad, and a ton of dessert. A sermon about how when there’s a big event, like a Red Sea miracle, the Jews love it and then complain three days later. What have you done for me lately? The big event is often a catalyst for changing. Sometimes you change big-time with a Red Sea-level event. Or slowly, with little changes, like saying something nice to somebody in shul. One day at a time, so to speak.

Nobody commented on my band-aid, and I even had an aliyah. The rabbi asked the congregation who was the tallest prez, and I guessed Trump, and it turned out it was Lincoln. But I got the aliyah anyway. That’s a thing – audience participation — at my synagogue.

There were about 100 people at the service. At least 85 were over 60 years old and band-aid ready. I thought I’d see others with band-aids. I didn’t look hard enough, probably. I didn’t see any other band-aids.

I have a couple more MOHs coming up. Keep looking.

—

[This happened a couple months ago.]

—

Yiddishe Cup plays 7:30 Thurs., Aug. 20, at Park Synagogue, Wain Pavilion (outdoors), Pepper Pipes, Ohio Free. Donations encouraged for Magen David Adom.

Yiddishe Cup plays 2:30 Sun., Aug 30, at the Coventry PEACE Park, Cleveland Heights, Ohio. Free.

 
Yiddishe Cup takes a lot of breaks. Why kill ourselves; we aren’t kids. Some bands — Hungarian bands, say — play their asses off. They just keep on playing. Kill themselves. I’ve injured myself too many times. Tendinitis, in particular.

The cocktail hour is “wallpaper music.” It’s just ambience; nobody is paying attention to the music. And the dinner hour, don’t go full-bore.

But last month we went full-bore. We played an hour and forty minutes without a break at a national convention for cantors in Pittsburgh. The Cantors Assembly. 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 fairly hard. Many of the cantors were traveling without spouses, and since it was a convention, it was tres loose. The hazzonim were staying at the party-site hotel (Omni William Penn), so they didn’t have to drive anywhere. They had nothing to do but party.

When we stopped playing, the cantors kept on boogying until the hotel turned the lights off in the ballroom. The cantors then went into the hallway, outside the ballroom, and sang a capella.

Two attendees said they had hired Yiddishe Cup for their weddings back in the day. A cantor from Plano,Texas, and a guy from New York.

At more typical Yiddishe Cup party gigs, I usually get antsy. Like “Where’s my water?” Or my left ear itches. But in Pittsburgh, the band was in the zone for the entire party. Sarah Myerson, a cantor and dance leader from New York, did a 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.)

Take me back to Pittsburgh.

 
The Asian market didn’t have salmon. The fishmongers didn’t even know what it was. Alice decided on escolar.

At dinner, Alice googled escolar. It is diarrhea fish, aka “Ex-Lax fish: banned in Japan and Italy.” The package, from Taiwan, mentioned something about possible digestive problems: “Escolar is rich and decadent . . . might cause abdominal discomfort if overconsumed.”

Alice wouldn’t eat the fish, but I would. Why would anybody knowingly eat “diarrhea fish”? Ask me. I also ate at Taco Bell recently.

Escolar is used in sushi, so how can it be banned in Japan? I have to look into this.

Wikipedia . . . “Escolar (Lepidocybium flavobrunneum) has been banned for sale as food in Japan since 1977 due to its high concentration of indigestible wax esters (gempylotoxin). While not toxic in the traditional sense, consumption often causes keriorrhea, a form of severe, oily diarrhea. It is often fraudulently mislabeled as ‘white tuna’ or ‘butterfish.'”

Escolar is simply a chunk of fat, and it’s cheap, which is probably why Alice bought it.

At Taco Bell on Monday, I read the Wall Street Journal while “dining.” The CDC advised customers to avoid T-Bells in Ohio and other Midwest states. I figured that was old news (WSJ print edition). I figured T-Bell had solved the problem by now. The store manager said business was down 75% in the store. Good. No teenagers or nutcakes in there.

The T-Bell Crunchwrap Supreme is worthy of risk-taking. The escolar, not so much.

(So far, so good.)

 
I dream about Buddy Holly.

One problem: I wear clear-frame glasses and Buddy Holly had black, and I don’t feel like going to the optician’s for new frames. I want to be Buddy Holly, but I’m kind of lazy.

I may have to settle for Klezmer Guy.

Animal voices — the sound of cats and fleas. Significant to my music? Definitely.

There are no rules for good music, only examples of it.

Yiddishe Cup’s Meshugeneh Mambo is a terrific record. (It’s on Spotify.)

The wrong song in the wrong place can often be the right song.

Hope You Like Klezmer is a coffee table book with more than 100 color photos of klezmer musicians. Some tied up, some with instruments in odd places. I’m in a bathtub with reeds, like Moses.

Half-ended melodies are fun.

I want to play gigs with the Buddy Holly Klezmer Band. Instead, I’m playing with Yiddishe Cup.

 
I’ve written several unpublished novels. My best was about a married couple with a kid who died from SIDS. An editor at HarperCollins liked it. She wrote, “But we need you to change it to a female narrator.”

OK, done.

My lit agent told me, “If you don’t want to change the narrator’s sex, don’t. I can sell it as is.”

OK, I’ll leave it as is.

My agent shopped the manuscript around. Evocative — as praise — showed up a lot – two years of evocatives. In the end, nothing. I probably should have rewritten the book.

I did. I sent the revised version back to HarperCollins, but the editor was gone. Editors jump around a lot. Susan Orlean had about 10 editors on her first book.

I switched to non-fiction, like Orlean. I wrote Bodegas and Bagels, a trade paperback about the Americanization of the bagel. It came out in 2017 and didn’t go anywhere.

I wrote My Main Man, Maimonides (2021). The Jewish Review of Books gave it five dreidels. Didn’t go anywhere, either.

Now I’m working on an e-book about the end of the world. The main character is a Jewish Studies prof who subsists solely on baba ganoush during the famine. I’ll self-publish. Annoying, I know . . . everybody is self-publishing and clogging the Quality Lit pipeline.

This morning I wrote a poem, “I Smoke my Own Lox.” I’ll paste it below.

No, I’ll spare you. I’ll put it in my book and make you buy it.

This post is fiction.

—

Yiddishe Cup plays a free concert 7 pm this Sunday (June 28), Alma Theater, Cain Park, Cleveland Heights.

 
There were several klezmer dynasties in Eastern Euorpe. In America, too. Even in the late-20th century, some baby-boomer klezmer musicians brandished serious yikhes (prominent lineage). Hankus Netsky’s uncle was a klez big shot in Philly, and Henry Sapoznik’s father, who was a cantor, worked in the Catskills alongside clarinetist Dave Tarras.

In Cleveland, the klez-band scene in the past 70 years has been Seaman, then Selker, then Stratton. (There are a lot of S’s in the yiddishe velt. My shul’s yahrzeit list doesn’t hit stride until the S’s. And the Z’s are zippy: Zweig, Zwerdling, Zwick.) My former rabbi used to mix “Stratton” up with “Seaman,” as in “Morrey Seaman” — a 1940-60s bandleader.

My great uncle Earl Kassoff led the Earl Castle Band. This was in the 1930s and 1940s. He was a drummer, xylophonist and house painter.

Morrey Seaman owned a dry-cleaning business. I, in case you don’t know, am in the real estate biz. Bandleader Greg Selker went into the executive-search business. Selker founded the Kleveland Klezmorim in 1983 and folded the group in 1990. The Kleveland Klezmorim wouldn’t play “Hava Nagila”; Yiddishe Cup would, so we got all the simcha work.

In 1992 I interviewed a local klezmer musician, Harold Finger. I can’t remember what his day-job was. He described his clarinet playing as “faking”(improvising).  When I met him, he was in a community orchestra. “I don’t do much jobbing anymore,” he said. (“Jobbing” was gigging.) Harold died several years after the interview.

I thought Harold’s kids would want a copy of the interview tape. I called a son and left a message, and didn’t hear back. The son should have called me. Harold’s wife was on the tape, too, badgering him about how he loved his axe more than her. Harold said, “What? I quit playing music for you!”

Coda: Another macher on the Cleveland Jewish music scene in recent decades was bandleader Barry Cik (pronounced “chick“). He had yikhes to-the-nth-degree. He’s from a family of Hungarian Jewish musicians. In the 1990s Cik’s son Yehuda was quite prominent on the national Orthodox Jewish music scene, and Barry wouldn’t shut up about it. When I played with Barry’s band as a sideman, I thought to myself What about your own band, Barry? The one I’m playing with right now! But Barry preferred to talk about his son’s band.

I get that now.

Yikhes (pronounced YIH-khiss).

 
[This essay, in abbreviated form, was in the Cleveland Plain Dealer on Sunday.]

In 2019 I walked over to Horseshoe Lake – which straddles Shaker Heights and Cleveland Heights — to see a bit of nature. The lake was gone. It was missing. The Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District had drained it.

And NEORSD hasn’t refilled it.

I’ve seen “missing dog” signs on neighborhood phone poles, but I’ve never seen a “missing lake” sign. Maybe I should put one up! Our family’s dog went missing last week. She ran away. And then she was found. Unlike my lake.

Horseshoe Lake (and adjacent Lower Shaker Lake) are like Central Park for many East Side residents. The lakes are refuges — our lungs. The lakes are a blue space. Residents from throughout Cleveland come to Shaker Lakes for fresh air and to clear their heads. We hike, meditate, see birds, see blue water, and talk to neighbors who are walking dogs.

At the latest Cleveland Heights city council meeting, approximately 80 citizens showed up to protest NEORSD’s removal of Horseshoe Lake and the sewer district’s proposed gutting of Lower Shaker Lake. Twenty residents spoke. Each had two minutes. What particularly ticked off many of the speakers was NEORSD’s plan to chain-saw about a thousand trees, and plant saplings, plus add riprap (small rocks). The end result will be “re-meandered” streams where Horseshoe Lake was.

This was news to many locals. Shaker Lakes news does not bump off Trump/Iran-level headlines. For instance, Paul Springstubb, a Cleveland Heights resident, didn’t realize what’s in store for Shaker Lakes. He does now. He just texted me, “Just read about the packed Cleveland Heights council meeting. I can’t believe residents of Shaker and Cleveland Heights won’t vigorously work to stop a clear-cut of the lakes’ trees! What I’ve begun to fear is the natural feel of a lake — with its surrounding mature trees – turns into a totally over-planned, neatly groomed, ‘just so’ park.”

Springstubb, who is a retired Shaker Heights High English teacher, continued: “All these saplings that the NEORSD plans to plant. That’s not nature. That’s upscale mall/commercial planning, like Legacy Village, Lyndhurst. Maybe we’ll have loudspeakers in the scattered ‘rocks’ located along the redirected, but perfectly serpentine, streams. Maybe the speakers will play songs of the various birds that lost their homes at Horseshoe Lake.”

NEORSD and saplings. Spare us the sunburn due to the lack of shade for the next 10 or 20 years while the saplings mature.

If any Shaker Heights or Cleveland Heights elected officials acquiesce to the destruction of Horseshoe Lake and Lower Shaker Lake, their names should be registered in the imaginary Albert Porter Hall of Shame. (Porter was a county engineer who tried to run a freeway through the Shaker Lakes in the 1960s and was stopped by citizens civic groups.)

Cleveland Heights’ new mayor, Jim Petras, said at the council meeting that the City/ NEORSD deal to eliminate Horseshoe Lake was made before his time. That’s not a good excuse, Mr. Mayor. The cities of Shaker Heights and Cleveland Heights can rectify this monumental screw up.

In the public-discussion portion of the council meeting, Cleveland Heights resident Kevin Charnas nailed the situation in one sentence: “The sewer district just bulldozes stuff, pun intended.”

Erin Flanagan, a Cleveland Heights lawyer, has filed a federal suit to slow down the sewer people. Amy Weinfurtner of Shaker Heights has led citizen opposition to the lakes’ destruction. She administrates the website shakerlakesconservancy.org.

If Horseshoe Lake or Lower Shaker Lake go away, they’re not coming back. Dogs come back. Lakes don’t.

Horseshoe Lake when it was a lake.

 
I had a neighbor who frequently offered me Beck’s beer. I could only drink so much. This guy could drink. His name was Weinberg and he wore a huge cross. (I once met a Jew in New York who wore a cross, too; he said he wore it to keep away the Chabadniks.)

My neighbor — or maybe it was his father — was a heavy-duty convert to Christianity. They all belonged to a Romanian Orthodox Church on the West Side.

My neighbor was quiet — no dogs, no loud music. Perfect. Just one small negative: he had a big Mercedes box truck (against city code). But I was OK with that.

Also, I didn’t like his snow blowing. It was too loud; I offered to hire a plow for his drive, but he turned me down. A very quiet guy.

Except one night in July 2012 around midnight . . .

I had my earplugs in; nevertheless, I could hear screaming. I thought it was from across the street, where teenage boys sometimes partied late. I tried to sleep through it. But then the cops showed up.

This was right next door. The convert was chasing his wife around with a butcher’s knife, and the couple’s kids were screaming. Four cop cars pulled up. My neighbor, in handcuffs, said through the bushes, “What’s going on, Bert?”

I didn’t know.

The family disbanded shortly after that. The wife said she was going to Phoenix with the kids, and she mentioned the convert had had extramarital affairs, and the kids talked about drunkenness, like “Daddy drove on the sidewalk.”

There were four pianos in the living room — three uprights and a baby grand. The convert said he fixed pianos for a living. About a month after the knife-chase, he came back for the pianos, with a police escort. I think he was charged with domestic violence. Maybe there was a restraining order, too.

Then a private detective showed up at my house; he wanted info on Weinberg. I didn’t know much except his preference for Beck’s.

—

Historical-accuracy footnote: The house was on the northern front, not western, but “western” makes for a better title.

—

THE KLEZMER GUY TRIO:

(L) Alan Douglass, Bert Stratton, Tamar Gray

I’m part of a kosher-style, David Sedaris-ripoff reading / music gig  7 pm. Sat., May 2, at Heights Arts, 2175 Lee Road, Cleveland Hts. It’ll be klezmer, spoken word and Motown. The trio is Tamar Gray (vocals), Alan Douglass (keys), and me on clarinet and spoken word. The event is free but get a TICKET prior because the gallery will probably “sell out.”

 
Alice told me to read a Wall Street Journal article on how everybody is ADHD or a variant on that. I fit a couple of the traits; I don’t like scratchy labels or noise. But then I didn’t fit into the “always late” and “loses things” categories.

I’m on time and don’t lose stuff. I told Alice, “I’ve had the same gloves for years,” In fact, I have three types of gloves: liners, regular gloves and mittens. Baby, it’s cold outside.

I went to a concert and took the mittens and liners. I wore some of that stuff indoors, at the concert, which was in my former temple, where I had grown up. A drafty, big place. The Maltz Performing Arts Center.

The concert was a tribute to Hoagy Carmichael by the Cleveland Jazz Orchestra. Very well done. Alice didn’t want to go. I sat by myself. Ninety minutes later: done. No glove liners. What?

I went up into the balcony, where I had visited some friends during intermission. No gloves liners. I went to the men’s room. No liners. I got home and told my wife I now fit the profile in the WSJ story.

Then I found my glove liners. They were balled up inside my ski cap, which was on my head. In other words, I had been wearing the glove liners on my head.

What’s that disorder called?

—
Yiddishe Cup plays on Purim at Park Synagogue (Pepper Pipes, Ohio) on Monday (March 2). Free.  7:15 pm.

 
“[Cleveland:] . . . its population abandoned to their fate, left to freeze their ass off, standing in the dirty winter slush, waiting for a bus that is a long time coming. Somehow they go on living.” – R. Crumb, cartoonist.

“Are you going to Florida?”

That’s what I hear this time of year. My tennis partner is in Fort Lauderdale. My real estate broker is in Sarasota. My lawyer is in Jupiter, Florida.

And I’m in Cleveland, freezing. I have a box of disposable hand warmers, flannel-lined jeans and a Patagonia parka. The first snow of the winter is nice, but the 15th snow — not so nice. And this winter — it started way too early, around Thanksgiving. The temperature was 12 degrees lower on average, per day, in Cleveland through Christmas.

Am I complaining? Just a bit. I like it here. My mantra is that bad weather is no excuse for bad attitude. If you don’t like gray, move or get a sun lamp. We accomplish more in gray weather. The Scots and New Englanders didn’t invent stuff sitting at the beach.

I’m a landlord, and a tenant recently called City Hall because the heat was too low in her apartment. The city of Lakewood — where my buildings are — mandates 70 degrees. That seems high to me. I keep my own house at 68. At my tenant’s apartment, the boiler’s flame sensor was going out. When I got the city’s low-heat call, I thought about Florida.

For one thing, Florida runs in my family. My late father said the best years of his life were his final years, in Florida. My wife and I — and our then-young children — went to Florida every winter. It was a good deal; my parents paid for the airplane and watched the grandkids for a week, and the only thing my wife and I had to watch out for were the golf-cart crossings.

The minute the plane landed in Florida, my dad would bug me about real estate opportunities down south. Florida bedazzled my dad: how it was growing so fast. We weren’t in the Rust Belt anymore, Son. On the drive from the Fort Lauderdale airport, my dad said, “This was a two-lane dirt road when we got here. Now it’s six-lane.” Glades Road, Boca Raton. “And there’s a bagel store on every other block.”

“We have bagel shops in Cleveland, too,” I said.

The Snowbelt . . . Is this the worst winter we’ve had since the 1960s — when I was shoveling driveways for a buck? It feels like it. Lakewood reinspected my (formerly) cold building. We got the boiler cranking and the thermostat up to 80 degrees. The tenants were hot. That was better than another no-heat citation. I’m not looking forward to my next gas bills, which will be record-breakers.

I haven’t been in Florida for more than a decade, but I remember an ex-pat Clevelander down there accosting me in a restaurant with, “Why are you still in Cleveland?”

That meant: “Are you nuts? Do you like snow, gray skies, slush and potholes?”

I do. As the Scandinavians say, there’s no such thing as bad weather, just bad clothes. A second ex-pat Clevelander said, “The day I hit 62 years old, I had to leave Cleveland.” She was considering Arizona, too. “But Arizona doesn’t have an ocean, and I like water,” she said.

Lake Erie is water. Look it up. Cleveland is doable.

One last word: layers.

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This essay appeared in today’s Cleveland Plain Dealer.

 
Mike, an old friend from high school, found me on the internet and pummeled me with questions about  Cleveland real estate. He lived in Minneapolis. He ended by mentioning a few high school buddies’ names. He said, “I haven’t thought about high school in decades!”

Was he bragging — as in I’ve moved on? I think about high school fairly often. Maybe because I live five miles from Charles F. Brush High. I also think about elementary school and preschool. And I didn’t even go to preschool! News: “Nostalgia has been shown to counteract loneliness, boredom and anxiety,” John Tierney, New York Times.

I go to class reunions even when they’re not mine — like Cleveland Heights High’s 50th. I was playing a klezmer gig at a massive, multi-room party center and went into an adjacent room for the reunion, just for the atmospherics: Go Heights Tigers.

I wish teachers were invited to reunions. In the 1990s, my 12th-grade English teacher walked his dog by my house almost daily in Cleveland Heights. One day I got up the nerve to say hello. And he didn’t remember me.

“I had so many students,” he said.

“I’ll bet you remember Ann Wightman!” I said.

Yes, he remembered Ann, the salutatorian. Ann got all As and one B. I think she purposefully got the B to let a boy be valedictorian. That’s how it worked back then (1968). Some smart girls didn’t want to stick out academically.

I haven’t been back to Brush High in a while. It’s off my flowchart. If I entered Brush, I would probably feel very young or very old. I think “very old” would win. Not worth it.

—

A guy named Mel called. He was considering my band for his daughter’s wedding. Right off he asked where I had gone to high school. That’s the go-to question here in Cleveland. Mel himself had graduated from Cleveland Heights. I answered and then segued into the main topic: “It doesn’t matter what you want musically. What about your daughter? She’s calling the shots for the wedding band.”

“Did you play sports at Brush?”

“Tennis.”

“Do you know Joel Schackne?” Mel asked. (Schackne had been a champion tennis player at Cleveland Heights High.)

“I knew of him. He’s older than me. Whose idea is klezmer music for the wedding, yours or your daughter’s?”

“Schackne is in Florida. He’s still playing tennis.”

“What does your daughter think?”

“What AZA were you in?” (AZA is a national fraternal organization for Jewish boys.)

“I wasn’t in AZA.”

“Who do you see?”

“A guy named Mickey — a goy,” I said. “You wouldn’t know him.”

Most of my high school friends left Cleveland decades ago. The guys remaining are, for the most part, entrepreneurs and family-business owners. A few made serious money here. The intellectuals hit the road.

Do I have any kind of post–high school life?

Maybe.

 
Here’s my latest essay from the Cleveland Plain Dealer  . . .

Dick Van Dyke turned 100 on Saturday. That’s no big deal — in my world. Last month my klezmer band played a 100th birthday party — our fourth in three years. There was a chair placed prominently in the middle of the dance floor, to lift the birthday “girl” for “Hava Nagila.”

I said to myself, “No way.”

Correct: No way. We did not lift the celebrant on a chair. But the birthday “girl,” Etty Hoffman of Beachwood, did dance. She was out there on the dance floor. She boogied. And she gave a moving speech afterward, touching on more than five generations of her family, including “mommy and daddy.”

Nearly 10,000 Americans turn 100 each year, according to the Pew Research Center. The United States has the second-most number of centenarians in the world. Japan is first.

After the hora, I asked a dancer — Ms. Hoffman’s niece Joyce — if she was going to live forever. “What do you mean?” Joyce said. “Me or my aunt?”

“You. Do you assume you’re going to make it 100, too?”

“I’m planning on it!” she said. Joyce is in her 70s and plays flute, does yoga, lifts weights, walks a lot, and is skinny. Bonus: Joyce’s mom is 103. She’s Etty’s older sister. (Joyce’s mother was at the party, too.)

My dad made it to 68. Shvak. (Yiddish for weak). My mom died at 83. Better. A year before my father died, I interviewed him; I said, “You don’t talk much about your mother. Do you ever think about your mother?” I annoyed my dad. He said, “Of course I think about my mother!” My dad’s mother had single-handedly run the family’s candy store on Kinsman Road at East 151st Street. My dad’s father had been hit by a May Company truck in 1924 and spent most of his time hanging out at the pool hall after the accident.

At Julia Stratton’s gravesite in 2020, on the 100th anniversary of her birth. (Julia Stratton, 1920-2004.) From left: Lucy, Bert, Jack, Ted Stratton

At Ms. Hoffman’s birthday party, my band played: “My Girl” by the Temptations; “I’ve Just Seen a Face” by the Beatles; Tin Pan Alley classics; klezmer instrumentals; and some Yiddish songs. The partygoers applauded our wide-ranging set list. At a 100th birthday party, everybody is 100% mellow. A 100th birthday party is not a wedding — no anxious bride. It is not a bar mitzvah — no sullen 13-year-olds. There is no kvetching, period.

In the 1920s, Ohio-born vaudeville clarinetist Ted Lewis popularized the phrase, “Is everybody happy?” And yes, everybody was happy at Ms. Hoffman’s party. She was born in 1925 and grew up in the Glenville neighborhood and attended synagogue at the Cleveland Jewish Center (now Cory United Methodist Church) on East 105th Street. Etty was in the temple’s Confirmation class of 1941.

Her 100th birthday celebration was at Park Synagogue in Pepper Pike. Park Synagogue is a direct outgrowth of the Cleveland Jewish Center. Same congregation, different building. Ms. Hoffman has been a member of Park Synagogue since 1930. I wonder how many relatives at Ms. Hoffman’s party think they’ve inherited the family’s longevity gene.

They’ll find out.

Mary Tyler Moore died at 80. Keep that in mind.

And happy birthday to Dick Van Dyke, Etty Hoffman, and everybody trying to emulate them.

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Link to Plain Dealer article here.

 
Why don’t columnists write about pet peeves anymore? That bugs me.

Why do nursing-home administrators insist on peppy tunes? Oldsters sometimes want to hear contemplative tunes.

Why do eyeglass adjusters have so much power over us? Did they all go to I.U.?

Why do “highly sensitive” people insist on telling us they’re bothered by the labels on their shirts? That’s irritating.

My wife took our electric toothbrush on her trip to Columbus. The electric toothbrush is a “permanent attachments to the dwelling,” ma’am.

What about those phone calls from my kids’ alma maters? I already give zero to my own alma mater.

When my computer messes up, why I do I feel like my arm broke? Why can’t I feel like a mosquito bit my ankle?

What about friends who grow arugula and offer you some? Why don’t they grow dates or figs?

Why do symphony-goers applaud wildly after every single piece? These people nap for 54 minutes during Mahler, then give the conductor multiple curtain calls. Applaud this!

Don’t get worked up over house address signs like “The Smith’s.”

I am worked up!

If you want to discuss cars, first ask: “Do you mind if I talk to you about cars?” Yes, I do mind.

Which is preferable: (1.) “He passed away” or (2.) “He passed.” Both stink. He passed what — Wendy’s?

Who’s nostalgic for mimeo machines? Somebody should be.

 
I came down with a bad case of Anglophilia. This happened decades ago. Via the Cleveland Press, I got a pen pal from Blackpool, England.

Bleak name –Blackpool. Then my Blackpool pen pal moved to Hamilton, Ontario, and that ended our correspondence. He lived several hours away. He was of no use to me any longer.

With no English pen pal, I decided to turn myself into a Limey.

And I’ve been a Brit-by-choice ever since. Everything about Limeyland fascinates me — in an off-kilter way: shandies, tyres with a “y,” cricket, venison faggots, regattas, even the bathroom graffiti. Bear with me. Check this out:

“This is not the place to sit and slumber but the place to fart and thunder.”

“The wall painter’s work was all in vain, the shithouse poet strikes again.”

These lines were on a pub wall in Bath. The year — 1980. You had to be there, and I was. I’ve didn’t visit the grittier parts of England. I didn’t need to see that.

Oh, to be in England.

I frequently go to the Cedar Lee Theater in Cleveland Heights to see films about England. My favorite  flicks are England-in-the-1950s films, like An Education and Nowhere Boy.

Clevelanders often complain about gray skies, but do Limeys? No, they don’t. They don’t get all cheesed off about rain and clouds.

Snow? I don’t think Limeys even have snow. But they would like it. I certainly do.

 
John Cermak installed a pool table, gun rack and shower in his parents’ basement. He lived down there his entire adult life. In his twenties, John drove a humpy Saab. Had to be a Saab. He showed me how to do oil changes on my car (a Plymouth Valiant) and helped me build a coffee table from pine 2x4s. We grew up across the street from each other.

John especially liked motors, fishing and woodworking, but that’s not the whole picture; he went to St. Ignatius High and graduated John Carroll University as an English major.

When I got into the landlord biz (thanks, Dad), I called John for advice on boilers, blown fuses, leaks and everything else. John was my guru of the physical world.

When John was in elementary school, he mounted a lawnmower engine on a tricycle. The guy knew everything.

John died in 1992 at age 41 from complications of mental illness and alcoholism. He could put away a case of Wiedemann’s in a day. Schizophrenia ran in his family.

A repairman called me and said, “The voltage at the cap is good.”

What’s that mean? If the voltage was good, why didn’t we have power in four suites? The man said, “The inside line, outside, is yours.”

John, you there?

 
I was at the Fuji Rock music festival, where I hung out with British lads — guys in their twenties. I was at Fuji Rock, in Japan, to see Vulfpeck. The lads were from Leeds.  Japan was so hot, the lads went bare-chested and drank a lot, and were amusingly, obnoxiously inebriated. Jimmy, on meeting a genuine VulfDad — me —  bear-hugged me and said, “I’m the stickiest man you ever met!” It was 95 degrees. The sweat.

Booze, Brits and heat.

No sane tourist visits Japan in July, when Fuji Rock is. The lads repeatedly mentioned how “warm” it was. (Leeds people say “warm” to mean “hot.”) Jimmy said, “There’s moisture everywhere.” He schlepped around a four-pack beer caddy. The humidity was Houston-level.

The Japanese — they can handle it. They don’t drink much in public (except at salaryman bars) and don’t complain about the weather. Air conditioning is generally “low” in Japan, on purpose, to save energy. Another thing, off subject: Japanese restaurants play quality background music — sometimes even Coltrane — on low volume. And everybody talks quietly in public places.

The Brits: total aliens.

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The above is autobiographical fiction. Yes,  I was at Fuji Rock but I didn’t hang out with Brits. However, I later watched a video about Brits at Fuji Rock. The vid is cued up below. Check out a few minutes.