Real Music & Real Estate . . .

Yiddishe Cup’s bandleader, Bert Stratton, is Klezmer Guy.
 

He knows about the band biz and – check this out – the real estate biz, too.
 

You may not care about the real estate biz. Hey, you may not care about the band biz. (See you.)
 

This is a blog with a gamy twist. It features tenants with snakes and skunks, and musicians with smoked fish in their pockets.
 

Stratton has written op-eds for the Wall Street Journal, New York Times and Washington Post.


 
 

THE CHOCOLATE FLOWS LIKE A RIVER

by Bert Stratton

At a candy-theme bar mitzvah, the dessert table is tortes and truffles, and the kids’ table  is do-it-yourself ice cream sundaes and candy bars.

The bar mitzvah boy — the candy man–  has a custom-printed candy bar named after him. The nutrition data reads: “Serving size — 1 young man. Ingredients — charm, wits, humor . . .”

candy-side-2-best

Yiddishe Cup wants its own candy bar.  It’ll be dark chocolate with slivers of old clarinet reeds. We’ll put these treats in the goodie bags for the bar mitzvah kids.

Any leftovers, we’ll take to Yiddishe Cup’s haunted house.  This year our torture chamber features Don Friedman, our drummer, telling nonstop Internet musicians’ jokes like  “What is the definition of an optimist? A trombonist with a beeper.”

Any leftover chocolates from the haunted house, we’ll give to our keyboard player, Alan Douglass, who is good for a candy bar and diet pop many mornings.  Repeat at bedtime.  I bought him a Snickers at a gas station and he refused it.  It has to be MilkyWay or Three Musketeers.

***

The candy expert is Steve Almond, author of Candy Freak.

I, too, did some candy reporting, but I didn’t have the name for a career in it.  In the 1980s I interviewed a chocolate factory owner who claimed dark chocolate was a Jewish thing.  Maybe because of kashrut?  [Jewish dietary laws]

Yes, a lot of Jews prefer dark chocolate.  For one thing, it is a health food.

This year Yiddishe Cup is trick-or-treating as klezmer musicians.   Yes, again.  But with a twist: we’re ditching the Tevye vests and caps, and going as chocolate fountains with silver-foil Frank Gehry antlers dripping Hershey’s syrup onto our faces.

—-

1 of 2 posts for 10/27/10.  Please see the post below too.

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8 comments

1 Steven Greenman { 10.27.10 at 9:54 am }

I’ll have a Yiddishe Cup candy bar. The clarinet reeds make it taste like “Crunchy Frog.”

The torture chamber is very scary.

2 Bert { 10.27.10 at 10:22 am }

To Steven Greenman:

Try one of our Yiddishe Cupcakes too. Also chocolate, laced with strands of violin bow horse hair.

3 "Kenny G" { 10.27.10 at 10:35 am }

Yukko!

4 Ellen { 10.27.10 at 2:30 pm }

Alan turned down a SNICKERS????? I think Jews like dark chocolate because it’s bittersweet….. sort of like milk chocolate that whines a lot.

5 MARC { 10.27.10 at 3:16 pm }

When I was a kid, before Halloween I ate a candy bar and kept the wrapper. I went down to the basement and filled it with nuts and bolts and glued it shut.

When I was giving out candy on Halloween one neighborhood kid who was too old to go out, came to my house. I gave him the tainted candy bar.

A few days later a mutual friend asked me, “Did you hear about that candy bar Larry got filled with nuts and bolts?”

Unfortunately Larry recently passed away at a young age.

6 Ted { 10.28.10 at 11:48 am }

I don’t think there were any torts on the dessert table unless the cakes were assaulting you. You probably mean tortes.

7 Bert { 10.28.10 at 1:03 pm }

To Ted:

Ouch. Thanks for the correction. I’m changing “torts” to “tortes” right now.

8 Irwin { 10.28.10 at 4:24 pm }

Before the war my grandfather was a manager and part owner of a chocolate factory in Krakow, Poland, called Pischinger’s Chocolate.

My mother used to tell me that as a young girl her father would take her school class on tours of the factory, and they would get free samples. Sadly, he was let go when Jews were no longer welcome to work such jobs.

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