ORANGE JEWS

Some bands play every third Saturday at Joe’s for decades.

Yiddishe Cup has ongoing gigs like that too.  But they’re annual, not monthly.

We play the City of University Heights (Ohio) summer concert series every year. We played in August 2003 when the entire East and Midwest had a blackout.  I thought the city’s administrator was joking when he said the show must go on.  I said to him, “McDonald’s is closed, there are no street lights, and the radio says stay home.”  He said play.  Our keyboard man switched to upright bass, and our sax player went to acoustic guitar.

We also play regularly for Orange Jews at their summer concert series in Orange Village, Ohio.  (Ohio’s Orange Jews are different from New Jersey’s Orange Jews:  Orange in Ohio is “Or-ange.”  In New Jersey, it’s “Are-ange.”)

We always do a folk festival in Lake County, Ohio.  That’s the Little Mountain Heritage Festival, where very few landslayt (countrymen) show up.

We’ve never played a gig where there wasn’t at least one Jew.  When we played a gig in Lancaster, Ohio, a local Jew disparaged his town, calling it “Lackluster.”  Clevelanders often do the same thing — the we-are-not-worthy routine — when they visit larger towns, like Chicago or New York.

We are not worthy of your Magnificent Mile, your Wrigley Field, your jogging paths along Lake Michigan, your hour-long traffic jams, your 16-inch softballs.

Chicago is a cool town.

So is Pittsburgh, by the way.
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2 of 2 posts for 8/26/09

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