{"id":310,"date":"2009-06-12T08:05:47","date_gmt":"2009-06-12T12:05:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/?p=310"},"modified":"2012-03-31T17:27:19","modified_gmt":"2012-03-31T21:27:19","slug":"open-mic-fright","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/2009\/06\/12\/open-mic-fright\/","title":{"rendered":"“OPEN MIC” FRIGHT"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>\n

On our thirtieth wedding anniversary trip,<\/strong><\/span> my wife, Alice, and I were in a small town, Creel, Chihuahua, northern Mexico, along\u00a0 with a lot of federal cops. \u00a0Some of them were crowded around a store window that had bullet holes in it.\u00a0 This was d\u00e9j\u00e0 vu for me; I used to rent to the U.S. Armed Forces Recruiting Center, which always had its share of bullet holes, plus red food coloring, red Jell-O and toy baby doll arms piled in the doorway.\u00a0 I never billed the government for cleaning up.<\/p>\n

The Mexican federales<\/em> wore all black.\u00a0 Some had masks, so the drug cartel boys wouldn’t recognize them. \u00a0Other than that, Creel was like Put-in-Bay, Ohio: a resort town with tchatche<\/em> shops everywhere. And there was a coffeehouse, featuring an open mic night, in the Best Western.<\/p>\n

I often pack a harmonica when I camp<\/strong><\/span>\u2014 and \u00a0we had just spent a few days in the Copper Canyon mountains \u2014 so I did a blues harmonica ditty at the open mic. \u00a0An American, Diddle<\/a>, backed me on guitar.<\/p>\n

After this cross-cultural interlude, my wife and I walked past the store with the bullet holes again.\u00a0 We heard a “rat-a-tat-tat.”\u00a0 No, a “pa-pa-pa-pa-pa.”\u00a0 We ducked and ran like Groucho Marxes. We wound up on the floor in a nearby hotel lobby, where a clerk jabbered about how she had never been so frightened in her whole life.<\/p>\n

Me too.<\/p>\n

And I had just paid thousands of dollars<\/strong><\/span> to get shot at.\u00a0 At least in Israel it would have made some sense — solidarity with my people and all that.<\/p>\n

How was your trip, Bert?<\/em><\/p>\n

Nice except for getting shot at.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On our thirtieth wedding anniversary trip, my wife, Alice, and I were in a small town, Creel, Chihuahua, northern Mexico, along\u00a0 with a lot of federal cops. \u00a0Some of them were crowded around a store window that had bullet holes in it.\u00a0 This was d\u00e9j\u00e0 vu for me; I used to rent to the U.S. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-310","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-kinder-the","category-on-the-road"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/310","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=310"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/310\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9002,"href":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/310\/revisions\/9002"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=310"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=310"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=310"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}