The past four days have included:

1. My first ride in a limo
2. Synchronized vomiting performed by two members of Golem in a Chicago parking garage
3. Three shows in two days at the Chicago World Music Festival
4. Eating a ridiculous amount of ridiculously good cheesecake from Eli’s Cheesecake Factory in Chicago
5. Golem receiving the Best Jewish Punk award at the Jewish Music Awards. Prize: a gold (spray-painted) bagel.
6. MEETING JOEY RAMONE’S MOM WHO SAID SHE REALLY LIKED GOLEM!!!

I won’t burden you with all the details, just a few. Imagine my surprise when a stretch limo picked us up at the hotel to take us to our first gig, Eli’s Cheesecake Festival (!) Upon arrival, we tumbled out of the limo, having already drunk a fair amount of Aaron’s Bialystock liquor. I headed for the port-a-potties to change into my show clothes. From limo to port-a-potty in five short minutes.

After the show, we waited for our limo to return. Annette called every once in a while, and each time the festival transportation coordinator said “They’re just ten minutes away!” An hour later, it was beginning to get dark, and the boys were running out of Ali G material after doing a valiant job of keeping us all entertained.

Finally the owners (Eli’s son and daughter-in-law) came out. “What, you’re still here?” They generously insisted on taking us back to our hotel, because they lived nearby… so we got to hear the whole story of Eli’s Steak House and how he developed his signature cheesecake recipe. They had been taking care of us all day–we got three cheesecakes, AND frozen chocolate-dipped cheesecake on a stick (!), AND t-shirts, AND they are fed-exing four cheesecakes to Brooklyn! “We feel sorry for you because you have to eat Junior’s,” they said.

That night, we got to check out the excellent Malian duo Amadou et Mariam, also part of the same festival, with our friend Ira. The next day, Sunday, we played at the Clark House (a historic 1830’s mansion with beautiful gardens). I was happy to see Nick and Laurie there. Afterward, the van took us back to the hotel, and Annette and I walked to Millenium Park to see the famous new Gehry bandshell. It’s cool-looking, and the park was beautiful. However – no offense, Chicago, but how can a park called Millenium Park not have wireless???

That night (last night) we played a double bill with Balkan Beat Box at the Wild Hare, a reggae club where, we were told, Bob Marley once played. Great fun all around. A little too much fun for two of our band members, who shall go unnamed. But somehow or other we got on the plane in the morning and got back to NYC in time for the Jewish Music Awards. We played a short 15 minute set (including a Ramones cover, Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue); got our gold bagel; and met Joey Ramone’s mom and some of his friends. We were SO honored that they liked our music.

As we accepted our gold bagel, I thought fondly of KOSHER, the short-lived but influential (to me) Jewish punk/country band I played with in the summer of 1995, back in Baltimore. We had one show–in Stan’s parents’ basement. I didn’t write any lyrics, but I loved listening to them. There was the plaintive country ballad, “Lonesome Jewish Cowboy on the Range” ("I’m a lonesome Jewish cowboy on the range / all the shiksa cowgirls think I’m strange / I left my whole mishpoche in New York / I’m surrounded by cowboys eating pork.") There was a hip-hop-ish number, “Bagel” ("Bagel oh bagel with your crispy shell / put on some cream cheese and you taste so swell.") And there was a punk song about Jewish food, in which Stan screamed “Farfel!! Hamentashen!!” As I stood on stage in lower Manhattan tonight, a soft gold bagel in my hand, I thought of Stan, Jon and Red–Baltimore punks with Yiddish on their tongues. It’s been ten years since the summer I played with KOSHER, but I think it taught me a lot more than I could have suspected at the time. Shalom aleichem, boys, wherever you are.

The weekend before last, Golem voyaged out to the wilds of Ohio to play our second Cleveland wedding. OK, it wasn’t wild. It was downtown Cleveland. Lots of concrete and empty buildings.

This is the third time I’ve played there, but I’ve never really gotten to hang out there except for the requisite trip thru the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, the first time, and a fancy steak restaurant the second time. I have this hangup about fancy restaurants, I just always feel like I’m going to do something wrong, like set fire to the place accidentally. But I really appreciated being taken out to dinner by our band guru, Jeremy Parzen.

This happened on the Cleveland trip last year. We sat down at this steak house, and right away the waiter took my white napkin off my lap and wordlessly replaced it with a black one. “Why, Jeremy?” I whispered. “Why did they do that? Am I a marked woman?” Finally I asked the waiter. It turned out it was because I was wearing a black skirt; the restaurant was so fancy, they changed the napkin to match my skirt. Not bad for a girl who usually wipes her mouth with her hand. I thought I made it through the dinner without any faux pas, but last week (a year after the fact), Jeremy told me that I had, in fact, put my napkin down on top of the candle and walked off to the bathroom. Apparently Jeremy put the fire out without my even noticing. Just goes to show you.

Anyway, this time I drove out with Annette, fearless bandleader of Golem, and the sound system. We were surprised to find pierogies and stuffed cabbage at a tiny roadside Stewart’s in Pennsylvania, but otherwise it was a very calm trip spent driving straight on I-80 and listening to Cajun music (Beausoleil) and talking about the hurricane and all the other stuff Golem girls talk about when they are on the road (use your imagination).

We had heard that there was going to be a big festival happening, and indeed, Euclid Street, a main downtown street where our hotel was, was full of open-air stages, multimedia art displays, and an impressively diverse crowd of Clevelanders. We couldn’t help but notice the EXTREMELY BUFF men and women scattered throughout the festival. I thought Cleveland attracted a disproportionate number of bodybuilders, until we saw them all streaming into our hotel and found out that there was a convention happening at the same time.

Anyway, Annette and I got up to our room and immediately started playing a particularly loud & obnoxious song which I love, when music started to come from the next room. Oh no, I thought, someone hates our playing and is drowning it out with their TV. We stopped, but soon realized that it was a) coming from outside, not the next room and b) it was klezmer music?!!! We flung our instruments on the bed, ran downstairs, and found a full-blown klezmer concert happening right on Euclid Street. Crazy. We listened, people danced, we went backstage and introduced ourselves to the band, and then headed to the streets to busk.

And busk we did… we put our cases out and started playing (that’s what busking is for those of you who don’t know). Clevelanders were generous & appreciative, and everyone was in a good mood because this great festival was enlivening the usually deserted downtown, plus it was beautiful out. We had to move about 8 different times as bands began to play on the various stages around us, drowning us out, but we managed to meet some fascinating people and make some gas money. And over the course of the night about 5 people came up to me and said “Excuse me, but weren’t you camped at the next tent over at Clifftop?!” Why yes, I was!!!!

The best part of the evening, though, was when Zack’s band played. I met Zack at about 4 a.m. on the last night of Clifftop (the old time gathering in West Virginia in August, if you have been slacking on the blog-reading), and we traded email addresses. So when I found out we were coming to Cleveland, I wrote him – “anything good going on?” He wrote back that yes indeed, he would be performing on at this festival on Saturday night. A few days later he wrote back to say “Just a heads up, it’s going to be a little strange. I hope you like bugs.” I told Annette this in the car and we wondered – were they going to throw plastic ants into the audience?

As it turned out, he was playing in a trio called The Helper T-Cells, who (at least that night) sing exclusively about bugs. They played on the same stage that the klezmer band had played on earlier, right outside our hotel! I’ve never seen anything like it. Kind of a cross between The Unicorns and Sesame Street and Hunter S. Thompson. They were dressed in rabbit suits and sat around a central pole, on top of which sat a rotisserie motor (I know because they announced it from stage) from which hung a mobile of large cardboard insect cut-outs. Their instrumentation ranged from kazoo to xylophone to ukelele. And they were GOOD!!! Really, the music kicked ass! And, this impressed me the most, they were able to heckle back a rather drunk audience (some of whom probably did not expect to see a band dressed in rabbit suits singing about bugs) and won everyone over. So, if you ever get a chance to see the Helper T Cells, run do not walk. If, that is, you like bugs.

The next day was the wedding and I ran into Carmina, a friend of the groom with whom I grew up playing violin at Peabody (!). It was on the 10th floor of a former 50’s style department store, and it still had all these amazing retro touches – the paint, the molding, the fountain in the center of the room. The drive back was uneventful except for a toothless guy at a gas station saying to us, as we finished getting our $3.50/gallon gas, “Excuse me ladies, but I can’t let you drive off without saying, God must have been in a really good mood the day he made both of you. And – be careful.” OK…..we took his advice, and made it back to New York safe and sound.

ok, this is going to be a short one because it’s 4 a.m.

but I just came back from eating borscht in the east village with some of the best young bluegrass pickers there are

and I really appreciated the juxtaposition of mandolins
and Ukrainian food.

another recent juxtaposition occurred at the show I played with Golem last week.

It was in Cunningham Park, in Queens…we played after the magnificent Claire Barry (now in her 80’s, half of the famous Yiddish song duo Barry Sisters). We did the same last year, and like last year, it was a total honor to play in the same concert as one of the most famous & charming Yiddish stars ever.

The snake (the box all the cables connect to in the sound system) had a sticker on it that said, “THIS SNAKE WAS USED BY POPE JOHN PAUL II IN HIS APPEARANCE AT YANKEE STADIUM, 1979.”

So the same snake was used for the Pope, Claire Barry, and Golem. Boggles the mind. A question for the theologians in the audience: does that mean we automatically get into heaven on his coattails?