THANKSGIVING GIG

 
The mother of the bride thought Thanksgiving Day would be a great time for a wedding because nobody would come. The groom’s side was from New York. Flights to Cleveland would be expensive. And many Cleveland guests would skip the wedding to eat Thanksgiving dinner at home with their kids. The cost-conscious mom was cutting serious corners.

Yiddishe Cup musicians rescheduled their personal Thanksgiving dinners to play the gig. Not an easy task, but doable. Then the mom called me again and said the bride wanted a different band. What? Who? I usually ask who the other band is, but I was so mad — mostly at myself because I had forgotten rule #1 in the wedding-band biz: it’s all about the bride. The bride, not the mom, picks the band.

I got a call from a bat mitzvah mom. She was a talker, just like the very frugal wedding mom. The bat mitzvah gig was going to be for TG weekend but not on TG itself. I didn’t pitch the mom too hard. I wasn’t crazy about playing on TG weekend. I said, “Yiddishe Cup has been around for decades. You’ve seen us. Everybody has seen us.”

She hired us. Then she canned us. She said her husband was sick. So what? Yiddishe Cup has played for sick people — even dead people; we once played a luncheon where the mom of the bat mitzvah had died the day before. We played in the family room instead of at the party center.

The bat mitzvah mom — the one who wanted us for TG weekend — said her husband had become depressed. The husband, a doctor, had lost a patient that week. Doctors lose patients all the time, right? The mom wanted to change the bat mitzvah date and the number of musicians.

Forget it.

What else can I say?

Happy Thanksgiving.

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