<\/p>\n
Yiddishe Cup’s biggest fan is Lea Grossman.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n She got us a gig at The Ark, the premier acoustic music club in the Midwest.\u00a0 She kugel-ed The Ark’s program director.\u00a0 She delivered a noodle kugel to his office in Ann Arbor, Mich. \u00a0He liked it and he hired us.\u00a0 (Hopefully our music had something to do with the booking too.)<\/p>\n I had been avoiding Ann Arbor.\u00a0 I had attended college there during the hippie era and hadn’t learned much. \u00a0There had been a quasi-ban on book learning.\u00a0 The foreign language requirement had been oppressive, according to protestors, and the Psych teaching assistants led T-Groups and gave everyone A’s.\u00a0 Until I signed up. Then it went to pass\/fail.<\/p>\n When my kids started looking at colleges,<\/strong><\/span> I told them Michigan was a swamp. \u00a0Too big, too impersonal.<\/p>\n I even rooted for Ohio State over Michigan.\u00a0 I harbored some serious animosity toward the Blue. I told Michigan to stop sending me alumni mail.\u00a0 But for $75 I hedged and sent a donation every year.\u00a0 You never knew.<\/p>\n Thanks to Yiddishe Cup super-fan Lea Grossman, I wound up back at Michigan big-time.\u00a0 Lea is 60-something but gets around like a coed, and she promoted our band to everybody and helped put signs on every phone pole.\u00a0 The woman can dance, party and cook. \u00a0She knows every Jewish dance, and has sung “Tumbalalaika” on stage with Yiddishe Cup at The Ark.<\/p>\n Lea lived near North Campus<\/strong><\/span> in a university-affiliated retirement community.\u00a0 It was like a dorm for seniors — real seniors.\u00a0 North Campus — the last time I had been there — had been a music school, a smattering of grad student housing, and one undergraduate dorm. \u00a0It had been the end of the earth.\u00a0 You had to take a bus to get there.\u00a0 (Still do.) \u00a0The dorm was called Bursley, as in “brrr, it’s cold.”<\/p>\n For Yiddishe Cup’s first Ark appearance, I picked January.\u00a0 Not too many rational Clevelanders scheduled weddings in January, so we had an opening.<\/p>\n Ann Arbor’s weather was just like Cleveland’s.\u00a0 Bad.\u00a0 And we got a huge crowd at the club.\u00a0 That was weird.\u00a0 The difference between Cleveland and Ann Arbor was Michigan had a puffy coat brigade. The worse the weather, the more the puffy coaters came out.\u00a0 It was almost an Upper Midwest can-do chic — like something from the Progressive Era — a bunch of irregular Jews in irregular puffy coats.<\/p>\n On our first Ark gig, my youngest son<\/a><\/strong><\/span> stayed in the North Campus dorm, Bursley.\u00a0 He was in eleventh grade. \u00a0(He also played drums on the gig.)<\/p>\n He liked the school and wound up at Michigan.<\/p>\n So I returned to the swamp– to see my son, and play gigs.\u00a0 (My other kids went to small liberal arts colleges.)<\/p>\n I couldn’t get the Michigan Daily<\/em> to write up Yiddishe Cup.\u00a0 Ever.\u00a0 I tried. The reporters wouldn’t return calls.\u00a0 Maybe they weren’t too crazy about talking to a middle-aged klezmer guy.<\/p>\n When I had been a Daily<\/em> reporter,<\/strong> <\/span>I had enjoyed the John Lennon and Miles Davis assignments but not the local-angle profiles, like when I wrote up the Discount Records clerk who played sax.\u00a0 (That sax player, Steve Mackay, was good, and cut some records with the Stooges later.)<\/p>\n Lea didn’t know who to kugel at the Daily<\/em>; the Daily<\/em> reporters were always rotating in and out.\u00a0 They missed a good dish.\u00a0 <\/p>\n Lea moved to New Jersey a year ago.<\/p>\n —-<\/span> Yiddishe Cup’s biggest fan is Lea Grossman. She got us a gig at The Ark, the premier acoustic music club in the Midwest.\u00a0 She kugel-ed The Ark’s program director.\u00a0 She delivered a noodle kugel to his office in Ann Arbor, Mich. \u00a0He liked it and he hired us.\u00a0 (Hopefully our music had something to do […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,16,21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1178","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-coming-of-age","category-kinder-the","category-on-the-road"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1178","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1178"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1178\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8879,"href":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1178\/revisions\/8879"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1178"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1178"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1178"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n“To Kugel,” this post,\u00a0 first appeared in the Washtenaw (Ann Arbor, Mich.) Jewish News<\/a>, Dec. 2009\/Jan. 2010.<\/span>
\n—-<\/span>
\nCheck out the new video clip “Driving Mr. Klezmer,”<\/a> live from The Challah Fame Cafe.<\/span> <\/span> The Klezmer Guy blog exits the loch (your computer).\u00a0 Klezmer Guy walks and talks.\u00a0 Rated scary.
\n<\/span>—-<\/span>
\nYiddishe Cup plays The Ark<\/a>, Ann Arbor, Mich., 8 p.m. Sat., Jan. 23. \u00a0 Guests include Hawaiian guitarist Gerald Ross<\/a>, comedian Seymour Posner, and members of the soul\/klez band Groove Spoon<\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"