New neighbors, old stories
[Alt text: A panda at the National Zoo today, chomping on some bamboo or sugar cane]
There's a Purim party happening right now in the parking lot of the synagogue next door. They've got a big stage for the entertainment, which is mostly pleasant sounding (my windows are open), except for the stuff that sounds like opera. I walked by the party on my way to get groceries and saw several hundred people gathered, mostly families with kids, people of all ages wearing costumes. It's just like Burning Man Decompression – except no one is high, wasted, or pressing their bare ass against my front door to piss on my doormat before they get down on all fours to puke.
I know so little about Judaism, I had to ask a security guard what was going on. And there's a lot of security. On a normal day when not much is happening, there are at least 4 or 5 security guards wandering around the building. Tonight they have a small army. And metal detectors.
In the late 1970s, my family lived next door to a Jewish family. I can't remember if I've written about this before. The parents were PhDs or lawyers or both, crazy smart academic types, with government jobs. Transplants from New York. They had four kids. The oldest one was theirs, biologically. The younger three were all adopted and bi- or multi-racial. There was a girl my age, who quickly became my best friend, and a girl my brother's age. They became friends too. So that meant our parents had to become friends. The culture differences between the adults, were, in hindsight, totally fucking hilarious.
My parents: Quiet, introverted, conservative, extreme WASPs, with ideas about how Things Should Be Done.
The Jewish parents: Loud as hell (we could often hear their screaming matches), and the mother, I will call her Joan, liked to walk around naked. Or hated clothes. I don't know. She was a sizable woman with enormous breasts and had no qualms about answering her back door buck naked when my father came looking for me. It made him EXTREMELY uncomfortable. "Jesus Christ, Joan, put on some clothes!" Yes, he invoked JESUS.
Joan, for some reason, was obsessed with kids' butts. If you got too close to her, she would grab one of your butt cheeks so hard it almost hurt, and shout "TUSHIE!!" My brother and I thought it was both annoying and funny. Like, "this lady is nuts."
They invited us to all their holiday celebrations, whether it was dinner outside in the tent, lighting Hanukkah candles, I even remember tasting Manischewitz once, wondering how the hell people could drink that shit. We attended bar- and bat-mitzvahs, having no idea what was going on (or what was taking so long). The only thing I wish they hadn't invited us to was the briss for the baby. Which happened on their DINING ROOM TABLE. I remember sitting in the attic with my friend, covering my ears so I wouldn't hear the baby crying, wondering how and why anyone could watch something so violent.
I think they were renting that house, because a few years later they bought a house up the street. I didn't like the people who replaced them in the house next door. Or rather, I didn't like their daughter. Her father was a Congressman, possibly or probably a member of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, which meant neighbor girl got to meet lots of Hispanic celebrities. Including Erik Estrada. She knew how much I loved Ponch and she lorded that shit over me for WEEKS.
Anyway, the Jewish family eventually relocated to Chicago, I think because one of the parents became a professor at U of C. They rented their DC house out to a guy who was a) running for DC mayor* while b) running a whorehouse. Twenty mattresses being unloaded from moving trucks into a 4-bedroom house, lots of cars coming and going late at night, etc. The neighborhood busybody started taking photos of all the license plates until business, um, dried up and the guy moved away.
So now I'm back in DC, with a different set of Jewish neighbors, who might also invite me to their holiday celebrations. But I'm willing to bet none of them would try to grab my ass.
*In 1977, before Marion Barry was even mayor, people tried to kill him. He was shot, and so was another guy. The other guy was permanently paralyzed from the shooting, so he had to sell his house because it had stairs. My parents bought it.
Links
In case you need another reason to admire Zelenskyy. (YouTube)
Ukraine is (was? sigh) so beautiful. (DeMilked)
A Putin portrait made out of dicks. (Boing Boing)
The Great Resignation was fueled by low wages. Also: Water is wet. (Buzzfeed)
And they probably had shit bosses. (DeMilked)
"You'll never see a U-Haul behind a hearse" – Denzel Washington on Desus and Mero. (YouTube)
Logo redesigns for companies leaving Russia. (Sad and Useless)
Nice work, Mike Park: Bruce Lee Band with Angelo Moore's Did You Find The Money Train? (YouTube)
"There is no idea so batshit insane that you can’t find at least one PhD scientist to support it" and other laws of the internet. (Substack)
Wombats poop in CUBES. (Smithsonian)
Airbnb tests new feature that allows Black guests. (Onion)