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bar mitzvah in Pittsburgh
Saturday, May 6 2017
location: 9th Floor, Imperial House Condominiums, Squirrel Hill, Pittsburgh, PA
Unfortunately, there was no sleeping in this morning, because there was a bar mitzvah to attend. There was a little time before leaving for eating various things (including cold not-so-great vegan pierogis from a local vegan Polish restaurant) and drinking coffee, which was unfortunately hazelnut-flavored. I might've thought hazelnut was a good flavor for coffee back in the early 1990s, but my flavor system is too sophisticated for such nonsense now. Looking around the kitchen, I saw a lot of kitchen objects (the coffee maker, a food processor, spoons, etc.) were all various shades of purple. When I pointed this out, Gretchen's father seemed delighted that someone had finally broken the code of the one weird trick he'd used when outfitting the Pittsburgh kitchen. I don't know exactly how he'd settled on purple, but it was in response to the overwhelming black/whiteness of the kitchen. And once he had that color in mind, he searched the web for purple kitchen products. There are plenty out there, though they tend to be of lower quality than similar non-purple devices and small appliances. Some, such as an electric can opener, appear to be completely unbranded.
As for my bar mitzvah attire, I continued to rely on clothes borrowed from my father-in-law, though that could only go so far. For shoes, I had to rely on what I had: my Keen closed-toed sandals. They look a little clunky but fairly unnoticeable when worn with black socks, but Gretchen still didn't think them appropriate. But it was all I had, and I couldn't wear my father-in-law's shoes. (He wears a size nine when he wants extra room for thick socks, while I can barely cram my feet into a size eleven.)
The synagogue was big and seemingly-empty when we arrived, though the early services were well underway. The bar mitvah would happen later in the early services, so we had some time to chit chat with unfamiliar people downstairs in front of the coat room while rambunctious little boys played nearby, somehow keeping their yarmulkes on through various wrestling moves.
Eventually we joined the services, sitting fairly near the front. The rabbi was a tall lanky guy whose body hinted at physical comedy that never arrived. The subject of today's services was the sacrifice of animals, which seemed like an odd choice for the bar mitzvah of a boy whose pre-bar-mitzvah party had been catered with vegan food. But evidently his father had done his bar mitzvah on this very same subject, and sticking to tradition and holding to established patterns is much more important in this branch of the family than it is in the part I married. Gretchen is hardly the superJew she used to be, but she has a lot of muscle memory. When she and Dina got up to do an aliyah (where they read from the torah as a little faux hand on a stick traced over the Hebrew letters), she seemed to do a flawless job, though it's hard to say given how poorly they were mic'd and my nonexistent skills with the Hebrew language.
It wasn't clear when exactly the bar mitzvah part of the services had begun, but at some point the bar mitzvant himself took to the podium to read from the Torah. It's more singing than reading, and my young nephew's voice proved unexpectedly gorgeous. In the past when he's sung, the notes bounced around in quantum approximation of where they should've been and there was a screechy quality that sounded like a personal affectation he considered a worthwhile musical innovation. None of that was present during his long, unflagging performance this morning. [REDACTED]
And then the torah being grandly rolled-up tight, dressed for bed, and put away. Now it was time for lunch down in the synagogue's industrial-strength ballroom. The request for vegan food had thrown the kitchen staff for something of a loop, though they soldiered on as best they could seemingly without consulting any contemporary references. There was a noodle dish that was pretty good, though it lacked something. When mixed with salad, white beans, and salad dressing, the result was actually one of the better-tasting things I'd had in days. But assembling such a combination was not an obvious path to deliciousness, and there was a palpable miasma of culinary disappointment, especially among those who would liked to have seen a big tin of chicken breasts.
By this point I'd discovered that someone had placed a half gallon of cheap whiskey next to the coffee urn on an unsupervised table in the back. It was like a token of complete adultness, declaring by its presence, "We're all [now] adults here." I went back several times to that bottle, mostly adding it to coffee. The only other person who seemed to be hitting it (except for that hatchet-faced woman in the bluejean skirt) was the tall, lanky rabbi. And yet there was still no physical comedy to be had.
Gretchen, who had gone for a time out to the hall with her phone pressed to her head, dealing with emergent real estate matters, was now sitting with me, and we were mostly chatting with her maternal aunt and family.
Industrial vegan synagogue food wasn't really working for Gretchen, and she didn't want to waste any Pittsburgh meals on mediocre food. So she, Dina, and I all decided to go try out a heavy-metal-themed vegan restaurant we'd just learned about called Onion Maiden. The dishes on the menu are all nerdy heavy metal puns, and I thought it would be a fun thing to report on with my vegan computer-nerd colleagues, all of whom seem to have an uncharacteristically strong affection for heavy metal music. But when we got to Onion Maiden, we found the place had been shut down for days because of a wedding for "Brooks and Dingo" (the poster featured a hazy photo of a bride and groom and crowd of wellwishers, all of them wearing gas masks). So instead we found ourselves at Apteka, the vegan Polish restaurant who'd made those pierogis I'd eaten this morning. I'm still not crazy about those, nor was I excited by a sandwich we'd ordered. But the dumpling & broth soup was amazing. I could've eaten twice as much of that. As for the restaurant, it's all very Scandinavian and modern, with lots of semi-opaque white glass and exposed stainless steel. Dismayingly (at least that was the story Gretchen was reading from my eyes), Dina was in a talkative mood and launched into a long story about a podcast idea she had for a historical deep-dive. It was about slavery or a Jim-Crow-era lynching or something, I don't remember. She'd had difficulty pitching it to perhaps the most famous podcast, so I suggested maybe she start her own podcasts featuring historical deep dives. It would be like the Memory Palace, but with interviews and on-the-scene reporting.
I guess we returned Dina to the synagogue on the drive back to Gretchen's parents house, where I took a nice solid nap. But then it was time to socialize again. A group of people (mostly all of them of Gretchen's parents' generation) came over to do some post-bar-mitzvah socializing. I sipped wine and with Gretchen's father's brother's wife and Gretchen's mother's sister about the horror and corruption of Donald Trump. It was nothing that hasn't been said before, but it's a thing that could be bonded over.
And then it was time for the evening post-bar-mitzvah dinner, which was more about partying than it was about the torah, and so of course it was the best-attended of the bar-mitzvah events. Notably present were dozens of young folks of about the bar mitzvant's age; virtually nobody that age had attended the bar-mitzvah proper. These young celebrants were all dressed up nice and behaving age-appropriately. There was a large section of the floor dedicated to games, even those that would interest a teenager, and that was where most the boys were. Meanwhile the girls sat in a number of self-segregated gaggles sipping soda pop and saying things to make one another giggle. For a good part of this, I found myself sitting alone at a small table. Gretchen had vanished to deal with another Brewster Street crisis (this one about the head-scratching incompetence of the microwave oven installation), and I didn't have the social energy to crash at someone else's table, even at the table of someone I knew. Someone had said that, since it was still shabbos, we were asked not to use electronic devices, so out of consideration I tried to do my best with written material I could find in Gretchen's big bag. The best thing in there was a single-sided sheet of paper covered with long semi-coherent palindromic sentences, many of them referring to the current President of the United States. Eventually I found Gretchen lost in a conversation with Dina in the comfy room outside the bathrooms. Not long after that, there was a dancing of the hora (complete with chair dancing), which Gretchen and I eventually joined near its end. For awhile there, though, we'd been trying to listen to a tale told by someone I don't really know. The hora was so loud I was forced to read her lips, but I could remember enough of what she says to say what it was.
Next came a slide show prepared by Gretchen's brother about his bar mitzvant son and providing a particular view into a life: that of the father. It involved dozens of pictures, though the evident growth of its subject happened in dramatic punctuations. [REDACTED] The soundtrack for the slideshow included the bar mitzvant singing a Regina Spektor song and then an unfamiliar song by the Indigo Girls. Supposedly my nephew loves the Indigo Girls, though not enough to be embarrassed by his love.
After a prolonged and agonizing series of slow goodbyes, we were loaded in our Prius with three passengers: Dina and her young daughter, and that woman whose lips I'd been forced to read in lieu of hearing her voice.
[REDACTED]
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