Why We Need Purim in the 21st Century

On the eve of Purim 2006, the relevance of the holiday's message seems almost embarrassingly obvious. Even those who only intermittently tune into world news must know that two high-profile, modern-day Hamans have been busy promoting their highly un-original plan for the destruction of Israel -- the leader of Iran and the leader of Hamas.

Weirdly, if you mush together H-A-M-A-S and I-R-A-N, guess what you get??

That's right. Haman lives. But not for long.

The way-cool story of Purim, compellingly rendered in the Scroll of Esther, or Megillat Esther, clues us in on a recurring theme in history: Evil people will concoct evil plans to annihilate Israel and the Jewish People. Tragic events will come to pass but those who seek to destroy the Jews will ultimately be defeated.

In every generation, misguided minds have been inspired to attempt what has historically proved impossible: wiping the Jews off the map.

From Pharoah fretting that his Hebrew slaves have been multiplying like pestilence to the biblical nation of Amalek (Haman's mishpocha) sneaking up on the escaping Israelites to the H-Man himself who was miffed because little Mordechai the Jew refused to bow down to him, to the Romans, the Syrians, the Syrian-Greeks, the Crusaders and the Grand Inquisitor who all had tantrums of mass destruction because the Jews worshipped Jehovah to the lumber-headed, rape-crazed Cossacks to the inimitable evil of Adolf the 20th Century H-Man and his Million Aryan March, to the poisonously petulant Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to the chilling character of Ismail Haniyah and all who preach contemporary Jew-hatred, this singular notion -- Hey! Let's Kill the Jews! -- has proven to have surprising staying power.

You would think that Iran would at least conduct a Google-search before undertaking the impossible mission of destroying Israel. I really think that Ahmaninejad's administration should at least create a budget line for a research assistant to prepare a feasibility study on this matter. Think about it. For way less than $100 -- the cost of about ten-hours of work from a computer-literate Iranian teen at the teen-friendly rate of $10 an hour -- Iran would end up saving something in the neighborhood of several million dollars. In addition, the advance legwork would save Ahmadinejad several painful post-mortems with his military on just why the mission failed and how the hell the Israelis could have so easily nuked the nuclear reactor, not to mention irritating condolence calls from folks like Haniyah and Malaysian PM Mahathir Mohamad.

But, screw 'em. Those who don't learn from history....

Meanwhile, here in the Big City, signs of Purim are everywhere. Almost every bakery in town has hamantaschen, the traditional pastry, shaped like a triangle and filled with anything from apricot to poppy seed to prune jam to Nutella; toy shops boast of their costume selections; restaurants (both kosher and non-kosher) offer a "traditional Purim meal." Even nominally Jewish shops seductively spin their pitches in Purimspeak, appealing to Jews and Jewish wanna-be's alike.

The most extreme and entertaining example of a not-necessarily-Jewish emporium doing Jewish outreach is the East Village store New York Costumes: The Halloween Adventure (www.newyorkcostumes.com). Seemingly staffed by Dracula's nieces and nephews with a few extras borrowed from Dawn of the Dead, this hardcore costume shop was populated yesterday by the most hybrid mix of humanity: Hasidic families, hipsters, goths, terrified-looking Jews from the suburbs, little boys with kipot, Eurotourists, teen girls with low-cut jeans and Stars of David, shleppy Upper West Siders, Brownstone Brooklynites, high school drama teachers, drama queens, drag queens, you name it, most of whom were drawn by the ad campaign the store had created, billing itself as a Purim headquarters.

The store was a mecca of marvelousness for me and Little Babe, who wandered in yesterday afternoon, shortly after lunch. Our previous costume-hunting journey on Friday ended in disaster when Little Babe bolted out of Abracadabra on W21st Street in a fit of terror.

(Evidently, Abracadabra had just acquired the Vincent Price estate and macabre artifacts lined the store: a 7-ft. tall gargoyle, leering clown heads, corpses propped up against a wall, terrifying visages, moving bookcases, bloodied body parts and more.)

Though it took a bit of cajoling to get Little Babe to enter New York Costumes (eyes squeezed shut, little hand squeezing my own) after the Abracadabra fiasco, once inside, he was won over by the gay (and I mean that in the old-fashioned way) spirit of celebration and the endless merchandise filling the friendly store.

Meanwhile, during the course of our leisurely visit, we found Little Babe's coveted JS Bach wig (only $14.99 and it also doubles as a Mozart and George Washington wig!), a pair of zebra-striped sunglasses for me and a couple of prank items Little Babe had been hankering for: a switchblade comb and a disappearing-blade (plastic) knife.

Reassuring Little Babe that we would get the remainder of his JS Bach costume from our local Salvation Army shop, we journeyed uptown to the Jewish Museum (www.jewishmuseum.org) to see the Sarah Bernhardt and Max Liebermann exhibitions.

Little Babe's reactions to the two exhibitions were exactly the opposite of what I would have expected. He was bored silly by the captivating multi-media Bernhardt show which featured footage of her performances, artifacts, costumes, jewelry, posters and paraphernalia and sighed and yawned his way through the darkened space, barely glancing at the video screens which showed her fainting and gesticulating and creating her own immortality.

Unexpectedly, however, Little Babe was quietly attentive as we walked through the Liebermann space, listening as I read him the gallery notes, commenting on the canvases, perking up when I pointed out sites in Amsterdam that Liebermann had painted and we had visited, noting the increasingly somber cast of his self-portraits, growing pensive as he contemplated Liebermann's iconic career coming to a grinding halt as Hitler rose to power and his work was officially banned, removed from museums, his artistic footprints erased as if he had never existed.

"Hitler didn't just hate Jews. He also hated art," Little Babe observed as we were leaving the exhibition.

The sadness of the abrupt end of Max Liebermann's brilliant career (he died in 1935 and his wife took poison upon learning that she was to be deported to Thereisenstadt in 1943) stayed with me for several hours after we left the Jewish Museum. Yes, it seemed appropriate to hear his tale on the eve of the eve of Purim (Hitler as Haman), but the message of Purim is triumph not tragedy.

Thus it was that I found myself barrelling northward with Little Babe in our red Dodge Caravan towards another mecca -- Trader Joe's (www.traderjoes.com) -- to buy ingredients for hamantaschen, the cookies that are shaped like Haman's hat and most deliciously symbolize the defeat of our enemies. Tonight, after Little Babe and I return from the revelry that is the public reading of the megillah in shul, I wil roll up my sleeves, clear a kitchen counter and make my buttery, whole wheat and Nutella hamantaschen, which Little Babe and I will then distribute to friends and homeless folks alike tomorrow afternoon, on Purim Day.

Sometimes I feel sorry for my children, growing up in a horrible new, post 9/11 reality, so different from my own secure, suicide-bomber-free childhood. When I was a kid, Israel was under constant attack but the rest of the world seemed chastened, horrified by the Holocaust, on their best behavior vis-a-vis the Jews. In those days, it seemed that the Arabs were the only outspoken enemies of the Jews (until we found out, of course, that ya couldn't really be Jewish in the Soviet Union either and that there were Jewish prisoners of conscience, still, the persecution seemed part of the whole corrupt and dysfunctional Communist mishegoss).

In the horrible new world in which my kids are coming of age, the hatred of Jews exists in sensaround, coming from all directions and in all guises. Sometimes it even comes from within, with Jews spouting the worst -- and most cliched -- type of anti-Semitic sewage.

A recent example of this was the appearance of the miscreant Norman Finkelstein on the Columbia U campus last week, invited by (big surprise) the Muslim Student Association, venting his tired tirade of Jew-hatred. The child of Holocaust survivors, Finkelstein has a worldview that posits that Jews have misused their victimization to gain cold hard cash and exonerate themselves of acts of inhumanity. Most unoriginally (yawn), Finkelstein calls Israel the greatest perpetrator of these crimes. Blah, blah, blah.

(Someone get this guy onto a couch... and fast. If anyone was ever in need of psychological help, it is Norman Finkelstein. I heard the guy talk at Columbia in 2000 and he is the most pathetic, f%*ked-up little specimen of manhood I have ever beheld. Hey Normy...Newsflash! You hate your parents, not the entire Jewish people. You hate yourself, not Israeli schoolchildren. It's called displacement. Get some help before it's too late.)

The world in which I was raised was NormanFinkelstein-Free. Back in the good old days, no one in the civilized world would give Norman the Nutjob a podium...unless by podium one meant a soapbox on the Bowery, where my "aunt" Lillian used to take me when I was a tiny little Bungalow Babe in order to learn about the inequity of the world and become galvanized to acts of Tikkun Olam, repairing the world.

Ao, another new and disturbing feature of my kids' collective world seems to be this mutant creation -- Kill-Me Norman -- trying out out-Jew-hate Adolf and Mahmoud and Ismail and Mahathir and all those pea-brained neo-Nazis meeting in the hills of Idaho or wherever-the-hell.

Which means that our people need the bravery, vigilance, intelligence and historical long-view of Mordechai and Esther more than ever.

It is nearly 4:30 in the afternoon on the Eve of Purim 2006. Little Babe has just come home from school, dramatically dragging himself across the threshold in a manner that would have made Sarah Bernhardt proud. He is faint with hunger, valiantly and prematurely opting, at the age of 10, to observe The Fast of Esther, which commemorates Esther's fast before she petitioned the foolish, love-besotted King Ahashverosh on behalf of her people. Big Babe, unmindful of the fast, has come home from his Columbia dorm to forage in the kitchen and select his Purim costume. Middle Babe and HOBB (Husband of Bungalow Babe) are asleep in India, having attended a Megillah reading earlier in the evening. Soon, I will begin to pull together the pieces for my own costume for synagogue tonight, either a mod go-go dancer or a loopy old Miami Beach matron, whichever one makes me look thinner.

As I stand uncertainly in the foyer of the 21st Century, I gratefully embrace the holiday of Purim. Purim is an unapologetic, kick-ass celebration of Jewish survival. It is a no-holds-barred collective thumbing of our nose at our enemies. When Haman's name is mentioned, we boo and yell and grind noisemakers and sit on whoopie cushions and stamp our feet and even blow trumpets to blot out his name. When we read that he and his sons are hung on the gallows which he built for Mordechai, we cheer. The reading of the Scroll of Esther is a great, participatory psychodrama. We dress up in costumes. We repeat verses along with the megillah-reader. Purim is The Great Dictator, The Producers and The Rocky Horror Picture Show of Jewish holidays...all rolled into one.

And when we reach the end of the Scroll of Esther and Haman has been defeated, we party like it's 1999.

_____________________________________________________________

F%*k Buddies and Alternate Side of the Street Parking

HOBB (Husband of Bungalow Babe) left for India two days ago with sixteen graduate students and Middle Babe, our seventeen year-old daughter. As a professor, he has a grant to study religion in a foreign country and will be gone for two weeks. Because of this, I am stuck moving our red Dodge Caravan from one side of the street to the other in that urban choreographic maneuver known as Alternate Side of the Street Parking.

(I'm also stuck walking Alfie the Pomeranian twice daily, which I try to do while moving the van. Multi-tasking is the Manhattanite's only shot at survival.)

Having last moved the van on Tuesday morning (Wednesday, in our neighborhood, is an Alternate Side of the Street Parking-Free Day), I had only a hazy recollection of the parking regulations for the south side of W105th Street, where I had scored a spot after only 25 minutes of block-circling two days earlier. I did remember, however, that the street rules were in effect from 8:30-10:00 a.m. After a futile conversation with the affectless operator at 311, Bloomberg's telephonic gift to NYC, I realized that I needed to haul my butt down to W105th Street by 8:30 or risk being ticketed.

Let me be candid. It was a shock being out at 8:15 a.m., venturing well beyond the parameters of my regular Alfie pee-pee 'n poop circuit. I am not accustomed to witnessing the Upper West Side waking up. Working out of home office in my Morningside Heights apartment, I begin my professional day by 7:45 a.m. and typically do not see the outside world until late in the afternoon. This possibly masochistic workstyle is shared by my assistant, Julie, who works out of her home office in much the same way. I am moved to leave my office only for meetings, emergencies (Gd Forbid!) and trips to the gym, though due to the location of my gym at the JCC of Manhattan (www.jccmanhattan.org), I am usually able to multi-task my workouts with social or professional networking.

Anyway, unaccustomed as I am to joining the morning herd of students and professionals shuffling up and down Broadway en route to office or class, I found myself withdrawing into a reverie about a recent conversation with a friend (all names have been changed to protect the innocent. Any resemblance to people you might know is strictly a product of your dirty imagination.)

My friend Talia (no, let's call her Mary Alice), called to bring me up to date on her relationship with David (uh, how's Christopher?), which has been going on for about a year. Mary Alice is 45 (make that 35). Christopher is 50, (actually, let's say 40). She is an editor (hmmm...how about cocktail waitress?) and he is a lawyer (wait....no. A professional cricket player!) They met at Makor (umm, make that The Learning Annex.)

From the way she spoke about him, it was obvious, at least to me, that Mary Alice cared for Christopher a great deal. Though they didn't see each other a lot, there seemed to be a strong bond between them.

Anyway, after a particularly romantic Sunday at the Mohonk Mountain House (...whoa, I didn't mean to write that! I meant the Sheraton Tara in Parsipanny, NJ) Mary Alice called Christopher and they gushed happily about their time together. The day had been extraordinary for Mary Alice and Christopher said it was special for him, too. They spoke several times during the week, but it was only as Shabbat (er, the weekend), was looming that Mary Alice realized that she had initiated all the phone calls they had shared.

"I'll call you tomorrow," promised Christopher on the Thursday night of their final phone call. But he didn't. Nor did he call once during the week. Something was up, Mary Alice thought. But what? In the course of the previous weekend, Christopher had extolled their friendship in addition to their sizzle between the sheets. But she also remembered a warning note creeping into his voice when she pointed out that they never discussed their feelings for one another. "If you feel things are going in that direction..." he said ominously, looking off into the distance.

As she was painstakingly mining their previous conversations for additional clues and conducting a full-scale a Relationship-Year-in-Review, Mary Alice had a profound revelation. She and Christopher hardly ever went out together. For the space of one year, their relationship had taken place almost entirely within the confines of a bedroom.

Sitting with Talia (um, Mary Alice), at Cafe Edgar's (I mean The Olive Garden), I felt like a character on an episode of Sex in the City, an archetype -- the sympathetic married friend with a healthy touch of realism that the sad yet starry-eyed single gal is in desperate need of.

Yes, it was possible that Christopher had suddenly had to leave the country or that he entered a witness protection program or was sequestered as the member of a jury on a high-profile murder case, but something in my gut told me otherwise. Since the best-selling phrase, He's Just Not That Into You had already been co-opted, I felt moved to tell my friend a true thing or two, Bungalow Babe-style...but she beat me to it.

"I thought we were soulmates, but it turns out that we were just F%*k Buddies," she said sadly, yet sagaciously, having analyzed her year-long tryst from every possible angle and being forced to conclude that it was only just that, after all -- a tryst.

Ever since I first heard that phrase uttered by the brilliantly bizarre store manager played by actress Jane Lynch in The Forty-Year-Old Virgin, I have both loved and hated the sound of it. F%*k Buddy. So shocking yet succinct. F%*k Buddy sounds like the grown-up participant of a Play Date. If I had a F%*k Buddy and wanted to see him (or her), surely our Mommies would call each other to make arrangements.

F%*k Buddy. So carefree. So unadorned. So friendly. So no-fees/no-obligation. It's the sexual equivalent of Commerce Bank, which took the formidable grown-up aspect out of banking and made it as brightly-colored as a candy shop (they even have bowls of red lollipops) and as inviting as a toy store. The message of Commerce Bank is come and play. You can almost forgot that your money hangs in the balance.

Here's what I've observed as a very-married Babe in the Big City: in the crazed, over-programmed professional and personal lives that we lead in this metropolis, single babes often unwittingly become the F%*K Buddies of men who pass themselves off as prospective boyfriends (forget husbands, for now. This is not about marriage as the ultimate aim, but emotional intimacy.) Sometimes women are fooled by an emotional con artist; other times, they delude themselves when the reality is as bright as bling. I know that there are some mythic, uber-liberated chicks who claim that they aim only to be someone's F%*k Buddy, not girlfriend, but I don't believe they represent a critical mass of femalekind.

As I walked the streets early this morning to save my van from being ticketed, I thought of Mary Alice and the quest for love and intimacy and the phenomenon of adult F%*k Buddies (until this recent conversation, I had kinda thought that F%*k Buddies and Friends-with-Benefits were strictly adolescent pursuits). I was wondering how many men get burned by being the unwitting F%*k Buddies of women. I was considering how to write about this subject without going off on a rant against guys or even the concept of F%*k Buddies...which might be okay (not to mention fun) as long as both (or more) parties agree that the raison d'etre of their relationship is f%*king and nothing else.

Such as love. Or intimacy. Or caring. Or even friendship.

As I reached the corner of Amsterdam Avenue and W105th Street, I suddenly realized that the concept of Alternate Side of the Street Parking regulations had everything to do with what was on my mind. Instability is the theme of our contemporary urban lives. What is good on Monday is bad for Tuesday, but it's okay for Thursday... just not on Friday. You're okay where you are as long as you move by 8:30 or 11:00 a.m. Don't even think of standing there. It's fine if you're with me on Sunday but not on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday or Friday. Saturday morning is okay, though.

Just make sure to leave by noon.

And let's agree that feelings have absolutely nothing to do with what we do together.

Of Shmendricks and Other Threats to our National Security

While shlepping through Loehmann's yesterday with Middle Babe, I had an epiphany. Shmendrick, one of my favorite words in the Yiddish language was, in fact, only a mamaloshen* wannabe, a Yankee Doodle Dandy wrapped in Jewish garb, trying to pass as a Hebrew homie.

This startling revelation came to me as I beheld a row of men sitting outside the dressing room on the second floor, clutching the pocketbooks of their respective damsels and more often than not surrounded by a bevy of bags.

Shopping. Men. Dressing Room. Sh-Men-Dr....Ick! In a flash it came to me! Some clever Webster musta pulled this word together after witnessing this pathetic phenomenon I was now privy to -- men cajoled into joining their women on clothing shopping expeditions and then reduced to waiting for them while they tried on zillions of outfits in Loehmann's famous communal dressing room in search for that perfect metziah!**

I'm guessing that the origin of shmendrick is early 20th century when indeed, the retail industry and the shmatta, er, clothing industry abounded with Jewish names and Jews were renowned as tailors. Probably, some young de Toucqueville went traipsing through a famous Manhattan department store, say, B. Altman, saw the waiting men exuding quiet desperation and was moved to exclaim, "Shmendrick!!!" (all the while thinking, Shopping...Men...Dressing Room...Ick!!!) whereupon one of the men who had been waiting for about five hours fell down from the surprise of hearing a male voice and his wife, emerging from the dressing room after having tried on her 275th dress, discovered her husband lying atop her (now-destroyed) ostrich-feather hat, hit him on the head with her purse and everyone around thought that shmendrick had to do with the guy who fell down and was hit by his wife and its original meaning was lost forever.

Though its origin was misplaced until this very minute, the phenomenon of the shmendrick lives on.

Case in point: yesterday, Shmendrick Row at Loehmann's boasted a diverse gathering of dudes including a committed to co-parenting dad with an infant strapped to his chest in a Baby Bjorn; a cooler-than-thou leather-clad hipster in his early thirties; a middle-aged out-of-towner in clashing shades of beige; and a Hasidic man conducting business on his cellphone.

Around the store, several other Shmendricks shlepped after their women, wearing looks that reminded me of Alfie's expression when I deliver him to the dog groomer at the beginning of the summer for his annual haircut.

God, they looked miserable, those shmendricks! Beholding them, I wished to inspire them to revolution, to rise and throw off their shopping shackles and run unimpeded into the bars of Chelsea to engage in some real male bonding over beer and a ballgame. What the #$%& were these guys doing here...and what woman wanted this abuse on her conscience? Certainly not I!!

As I trudged behind Middle Babe, carrying her shopping bags from H&M and Abracabadra (costumes from Once Upon a Mattress, performed last week by her high school, starring her as Princess Winnifred the Woebegone), I tried to imagine dragging HOBB (Husband of Bungalow Babe) with me on a shopping excursion and realized that having him around me in any retail setting was sure to induce misery, perhaps more in me than him.

HOBB is the most anti-consumerist person I know. Buying couches for our living room for the first time after 22 years of marriage this past fall (previous couches were all family cast-offs) nearly resulted in his hospitalization from emotional trauma. Our little march down the aisles of Tiffany and Co. nearly 23 years ago to select my engagement ring had to be followed by a nourishing lunch at The Great American Health Bar after his blood pressure fell precipitously. He has been known to bolt out of Bloomingdale's and meander through Macy's in a zomboid state, alarming security guards and shoppers alike. Even popping into Fairway to buy dinner fare is something he tries to avoid.

Dragging this dude with me in order to have him sit on a bench with a group of condemned men -- think of them as Dead Men Shopping -- so that I can pop out of the dressing room every five minutes to grill him on whether this dress/skirt/suit/pair of pants/bathing suit/shoes/necklace/bracelet/pair of socks makes my butt look big seems to me an act of intolerable cruelty, not to mention a completely futile venture because our marriage is a big-butt-free zone, that is, HOBB has never once told me that my butt looks big in anything (even when it most certainly has) most likely because someone tipped him off to the fact that you can NEVER, under any circumstances, EVER tell your wife that her butt looks big.

And anyway, having HOBB along while I drift mindlessly through rows of frocks would completely ruin the therapeutic aspect of shopping for me. I might have to talk to him, destroying the lovely reverie I enter into. I might have to help him find the men's room. He might try to talk me into buying an article of clothing that is annoyingly modest, more suitable for synagogue, say, than my current sacriligious style. Come to think of it, I cannot think of a single reason to have him along, in fact, if he actually insisted upon accompanying me on a shopping expedition, I might have to melodramatically threaten to throw myself off the top of Daffy's Herald Square.

I can carry my own frickin' bags, for godsake!!!

Lest you think that this is a rant against men shopping, please let me reassure you that I believe men are entitled to the same retail indulgences as their female counterparts. And just as Shmendricks are completely pathetic, so, too, Shwomfricks (Shopping...Women...Fitting Room...Ick!!!) are just as terrible to behold: women turned a shade of bilious yellow, leaning against the wall of a place like Syms, trying to ignore the fact that their husbands' waistlines have grown another 4 inches since last year.

In fact, for anyone dying to receive acclaim for coining a faux Yiddish word, Shwomfrick is up for grabs. E-mail me to find out how much it'll cost you to pass it off as your own invention.

Let me be orthodox about this: the only time it is appropriate to accompany a member of the opposite sex on a clothing shopping expedition is when you are their parent. So that's what I was doing yesterday with Middle Babe and gladly do for her brothers, Big and Little Babe. Of course, at 21, Big Babe prefers to shop by himself and favors such outre venues as ebay and the Salvation Army on W96th Street, where he has scored amazing purchases for peanuts. I wish that Time Out New York (www.timeoutny.com) would take notice of his style and feature him in their magazine. (Att: Fashion Editor. He can be reached via his blog at ajgoldmann.blogspot.com) And 10-year-old Little Babe can only be dragged to a limited number of dressing rooms before having a complete meltdown and tearfully petitioning me for a pet hedgehog.

So, yeah, I'd have to say that the best, most-authentic clothing shopping experience can be shared between two people of the female persuasion, preferably if they are related. Who better to laugh and cry with in the dressing room when the three-way mirror reveals a butt that is not just big but taking over the world as we know it?? Who better to depend upon for honest appraisal of your prospective purchases? Who can better talk you out of disastrous fashion mistakes and talk you into brilliant style coups? And who can better convince you to buy something just because they actually want to wear it but don't want to shell out the cash??

So, today, RIGHT THIS MINUTE, I hereby propose a national holiday, something bigger than International Women's Month, Black History Month or even Take Our Daughters to Work Day. (Copywriters at Bungalow Babe in the Big City are currently hard at work drafting the exact wording for the charter.) While our nation was sleeping, a new generation of Shmendricks rose up -- no longer just from the suburbs or the Upper East Side or Cleveland. These new Shmendricks hail from Williamsburg (the cool section, not the Hasidic section); from Park Slope, from W86th Street, from Hastings-on-Hudson, f'crissakes!!

These neo-Shmendricks -- hip, young and sexy -- threaten the integrity of our social fabric. Sisters, unite!!! Shackle your men to the kitchen counter and take your womenfolk shopping today!!
_________________________________________________________________
*mothertongue, i.e. -- Yiddish
**a real find

A Kaddish for Ilan and Imette

He was 23 years old, a French Jew saving up money to move to Israel, working at a cellphone shop along Boulevard Voltaire in Paris's 11th arrondissement. She was 24, a graduate student from Boston, studying at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in Manhattan, living on West End Avenue. The photographs accompanying the heartbreaking, horrific articles about their respective murders show beautiful young people smiling for the camera, eyes lit with hope, utterly unable to foresee the fate that would befall them.

His name was Ilan Halimi. Her name was Imette St. Guillen. Yitgadal v'yitkadash sh'may rabbah.*

The outlines of their cases have some striking similarities. Last seen by a friend at The Falls, a bar on Lafayette Street in SoHo, Imette's naked, battered, raped and asphyxiated body was found along a desolate backroad in Brooklyn last week, wrapped in a cheap, floral-patterned quilt. Her trademark mane of shiny black hair had been chopped off. Her face had been covered with strips of packing tape. A sock was shoved down her throat. Ilan was discovered on February 13th, stumbling naked, burned, beaten, bruised and bound out of the woods near a train station 15 miles from Bagneux, France, evidently dumped out of a vehicle and left for dead. His head was shaved and adhesive tape covered his hands and eyes. Acid burns covered 60 percent of his body. He had been held captive for the preceding three weeks in a cellar apartment on Rue Serge Prokofiev in Bagneux, tortured continuously. Phone calls made to family members featured the sounds of his agony in the background. Photos of his torture were sent over the internet. He died in an ambulance on the day he was discovered, en route to the hospital.

Though the French police initially resisted treating the Halimi case as a hate-crime, there is no doubt, now that the investigation is over a month and a half old and most of the perpetrators have been caught, that Ilan was chosen to be tortured and killed because he was a Jew. For Imette, only one week into the investigation, there are no leads on the motive of her killers, though experts in the field of criminal psychology have noted the serial-killer-like details of the case, the likelihood of more than one participant in her torture and slaying and the hatred -- though anonymous -- that marks the means of her murder.

Of the dozens of articles I have read on Ilan Halimi, none are finer than the one by Nidra Poller, an American writer living in Paris, which appeared in the Wall Street Journal. Check it out at: http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110008006&ojrss=wsj. Meanwhile, with the plethora of pieces in the New York and Boston papers, I am hard pressed to recommend just one article or newslink about Imette St. Guillen. I have been impressed, however, with the clarity and dignity of the NY Times's coverage: www.nytimes.com.

There are so many stages with these high-profile murder cases...the Breaking News stage of shocking headlines and incomplete information; the Rush to Report stage of media venues racing to retrieve new details from the case, (resulting in information overload for the general public and the creation of rumors); the Parade of Pundits stage where commentators compete to contextualize the crime or draw some greater, larger meaning from it; the A-List News stage where the story dominates newspapers and networks and seems to become a part of the world in which we live; the Relevant Yet no Longer Shocking stage where the case recedes somewhat in the mind of the public; the Also-Ran stage when the story is suddenly upstaged by an even more horrific case; and every stage after that in which work the story bobs and weaves its way in and out of public awareness even as the investigation goes on and the real-life tragedy shatters the lives of those who loved the victim.

It is late on a Saturday night. I am enmeshed within yet another stage -- the Horrific Proof of Man's Inhumanity stage. I desperately want to go to sleep yet I am haunted by the brutal murders of Ilan and Imette, a Hansel and Gretel who wandered into the witch's house and found out the terrible truth about fairy tales. They seem familiar to me, perhaps because I am so familiar with their too-short biographies right now. Imette lived on the Upper West Side -- my own neighbhorhood. Ilan lived in Paris, a city I dearly love (despite the growing anti-Semitism there, which began well before this celebrated case). The footpaths of their lives might have overlapped with my own.

The proximity of certain passings seem to transcend mere coincidence. Famously, there are the cases of elderly spouses dying close together; in fact, just last week I attended a shiva **for a friend's father whose wife had passed on five weeks earlier. I remember the death of Mother Teresa following on the heels of Princess Diana's death. We were living in Jerusalem at the time and when I heard the news of Diana's death, I burst into tears, instantly falling into mourning for an iconic woman whose life could not have been more different than my own, but whom I had always identified with. When, days later, Mother Teresa died, I felt that she had willed her own passing, knowing that Diana -- too young, bereft of her small sons, was in need of her consolation in heaven.

So, too, I feel that there is a spiritual connection between the deaths of Ilan Halimi and Imette St. Guillen. Somehow, I see Imette -- the dedicated and brilliant young student of criminal law -- summoned to heaven by the Celestial Court after the despicable murder of Ilan, enlisted to train an army of angels so that they might intervene in earthly affairs when mankind, fueled by hatred, turns most inhumane.

__________________________________________________________________
*Great and Holy is His Name. The opening words of the Kaddish -- a prayer of mourning recited by an immediate family member.
**The seven-day period of mourning proscribed by Jewish law.

Confessions of a Thursday Night

I blush to file this post. Last night, I had the most mindblowing experience one can have courtesy of a telephone.

My husband flew to Denver yesterday morning, leaving me all alone in New York (not counting Big Babe, Middle Babe and Little Babe, Alfie the Pomeranian, Sam the Hamster and the newest hamsterettes -- Emma II and Rebecca II. More about them later.)

Separated by thousands of miles and a time zone, we nevertheless achieved intimacy by watching the Colbert Report together -- he from his hotel room, me, sprawled on the living room couch, breathlessly checking in with each other during the commercial breaks.

What woman doesn't fantasize about being with two men at once? Last night I lived the fantasy, with the help of television and telephone. It was like nothing I had ever experienced...a telecom menage-a-trois.

Post-Colbert, spent yet satisfied, I was channel-surfing when suddenly I wiped out on the shore of Larry King who was interviewing a Britney-blond Roseanne Barr. If ever one needed proof that blondes are, indeed, dumber than brunettes or redheads or even really senile people with white hair, here it was. Blond Roseanne was a LOT dumber than the Brunette Roseanne I remember.

I tuned in just as Larry King was prompting the exceptionally loud actress to talk about her turnaround sixteen years ago, after her life fell to pieces. Across the bottom of the screen viewers were reminded that she had multiple personality disorder, depression and other tsurris.* How was she able to eventually pull everything together?

Kabbalah.

Now, I am not a dedicated Larry King fan (in fact, I often don't get him) but I appreciated the twinkle in his eye when the K word fell from Roseanne's lips. Oh yeah, we're gonna have some fun. Kabbalah is Jewish, he asked/prompted the (embarrassingly enough) Jewish Ms. Barr. Roseanne seemed stuck, agreed that Kabbalah was Jewish, but then began talking about how universal it really is, how for centuries, people from around the world practiced it. Even Christians, she pointedly said.

Others have ranted about this, so I don't want to be redundant (or unoriginal), but really, what the @#$% is up with celebrities and Kabbalah???? If ever something was laughable, it is this. Imagine, an esoteric Jewish mystical tradition involving rigorous study and spiritual practice based on intimate knowledge of Jewish text and tradition suddenly co-opted by the most shallow people on earth....but really, just as a brand name. They have no clue what Kabbalah is about and the shanda** is that those huskters who are busily promoting the practice of celeb-kabbalah don't even have enough public relations acumen to realize that the more intelligently their practitioners can speak about Kabbalah, the better they will be able to sell their brand.

Maybe that's why I just saw cases of Kabbalah Energy Drink being handed out for free on the Columbia campus.

Meanwhile, the Roseanne ridiculousness was just an unfortunate cap to what had actually been a magical evening in the life of Bungalow Babe in the Big City...oh, and I mean before the Colbert-HOBB (husband of Bungalow Babe)-me adventure. But that magical experience was rooted in a very sad moment in the life of Little Babe who was home from school because of the snowstorm (that never actually happened, but what the hell).

I was at the JCC's gym talking to one of the coolest rabbis in the world, Rabbi Levi Kelman of Kehillat Kol Haneshama in Jerusalem (in the States for a visit), when my cellphone rang. It was Little Babe calling from home. Tearfully, he informed me, "Rebecca is dead."

I stopped breathing. Rebecca is Middle Babe's best friend. Wild panic overtook me for a millisecond until I realized that I would not be receiving such horrific (Gd Forbid, pooh, pooh, pooh!!!!) news from my 10-year-old son. The Rebecca in question was a rodent, his beloved hamster.

"Oh, sweetie!" My heart went out to Little Babe who loved his pets and all animals. I pantomimed to Levi the contents of my conversation and he uttered an appropriate, barukh dayan haemet.*** Promising Little Babe a funeral in full regalia later in the day, I urged him to remove Rebecca from her cage -- wearing plastic gloves, of course -- place her inside a ziplock baggie and write a nice headstone inscription for her on an index card.

The rest of the day seemed to fly by in a haze of workaholic frenzy and suddenly, it was nighttime and Middle Babe called from New Jersey, where she had been hanging out with BOMB (boyfriend of Middle Babe) since her school also panicked because of the (non-) weather and let the kids out early.

"I'm really sorry, Mom, but could you come and pick me up???" she asked, plaintively.

I looked out the window where our red Dodge Caravan was parked, covered in ice and snow. Ugh. Actually, I was just settling in for a night of relaxation and Little Babe was looking sleepy to me. Cleaning off the car and driving it on icy roads over the GW was not really what I had in mind but yet, there was Middle Babe in New Jersey and HOBB was in Denver, so it looked like I would be shortly scraping ice.

As I got ready to drive westward, I realized the silver-lining of this excursion. Rebecca the Hamster!!! She was as yet unburied, lying fetal-curled within a Target-brand zip-lock bag on the windowsill of our front hallway! Lovingly, Little Babe had included some pine shavings for her comfort and a beautifully-written headstone inscription that began, "Dear Reb. I wish you weren't dead. But you are."

Little Babe's pet deserved a proper burial...and she would be getting one. In New Jersey.

Ten minutes later, Little Babe, Rebecca the (dead) hamster, Alfie the Pomeranian and I left the overheated confines of our apartment and headed into the arctic air. Yes, it took about 15 minutes to de-ice the car, and yes, my hands froze. Still, I was glad to be able to perform this final mitzvah. (Judaism takes proper burial very seriously).

Here's where my values got screwed up a bit. As we were driving to the highway, I was suddenly saddened by the thought of Rebecca's empty cage and realized that Petco on Broadway was probably still open at this hour. "How about stopping at Petco to look at the baby hamsters?" I suggested to Little Babe who was quietly mourning Rebecca in the back seat.

"YEAH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" he yelled enthusiastically. Fifteen minutes later, we emerged with not one, but two new baby dwarf hamsters, which he immediately named Rebecca II and Emma II, after Emma the first who was killed this past summer by Felix the Evil Cat, Big Babe's (former) feline.
Little Babe's face shone with joy. Though delighted to see his mood lifted, I did worry about transmitting the ethic of a beloved pet as an instantly replaceable commodity.

Once in New Jersey, we tracked down Middle Babe and BOMB at a Chinese restaurant. Mooching off of their tea and fortune cookies, we planned Rebecca's funeral. BOMB suggested a local park. Little Babe and I had practiced the service on the drive over the bridge and we informed Middle Babe and Bomb that the funeral would be New Orleans-style, in homage to Mardi Gras and the city's rebirth after the devastation of Katrina.

And so, it came to pass, that around 9 pm, Little Babe, Middle Babe, BOMB, Alfie and I stood shivering in a semi-circle next to a naked tree (elm? oak? birch?beech? redwood? do Jewish people know anything about trees??) in a snowy park in Teaneck, NJ, singing Kol Ha-Olam Kulo Gesher Tzar Meod (The Entire World is a Narrow Bridge), an appropriate dirge, followed by Glory, Glory Halleluyah, in both English and Hebrew. That was the NOLA part of the funeral. Placing Rebecca the hamster in the snow, we all participated in covering her burial baggie with snow and said nice things about her, such as that she didn't bite us and didn't poop too much when we let her run around the apartment.

With the atmospheric sound of a New Jersey Transit train running in the background and Alfie straining the leash, overwhelmed by the unfamiliar scent of New Jersey's dog population, we stood in the pristine snow, paying our respects to a small, furry friend, accompanying her on her journey to Hamster Heaven.

________________________________________________________________
*troubles, woes
**scandal
***Blessed be the True Judge. What one says upon hearing of a death.

Are Men (Who Hate Women) Necessary?

Monday morning got off to a surreal start. A guy from the West Coast was eager to break onto the East Coast circuit with his book and message. He had a unique approach for men who need help dealing with women. He was a favorite of talk shows and had recently been quoted in the NY Post on why Valentine's Day is such a drag for guys. To this end, he wanted to talk to someone with the ear of the local media and program directors at places like the 92nd St. Y (www.92Y.org).*

Okay, I said to my friend, Judy. Send him on.

Five seconds later, my phone rang. The voice on the other end told me he wrote a book for guys who are sick of being taken advantage of by women. He wanted to come to New York to promote it, but he wondered if New York is the right venue because it is "full of princesses."

Come again?

Evidently clueless that a New York woman might have special disdain for any guy who alleges that her city is filled with princesses yet all-too-eager to reveal the crux of his philosophy to a citizen of this regal city, West Coast Phone Dude immediately followed up with a statement that was stunning in both its brevity and its vulgarity:

Women, he told me, want men to kiss their asses.

It's not every day that a conversation with a prospective client opens with such bold self-expression, such brio. Women want men to kiss their asses. Wow. I pondered the meaning of that provocative statement. Now, I know that he didn't mean it in the literal sense, with apologies to Owen Wilson (http://www.wilson-brothers.com/owen/) who reportedly spent two hours this past summer licking some lassie's bare buttocks. Did he mean it, perhaps, in the defiant "go to hell" way that someone you've succeeded in pissing off might yell at you --hey, kiss my ass!! Or did he mean that women want men to grovel at their feet, dote on them, worship them, do everything humanly possible to please them, buy them expensive gifts, take them to fancy restaurants, ignore their PMS, never tell them they look fat and essentially, build their lives around them??

He meant the latter, vomiting out the various ways in which women step all over the male race. Moreover, there was an epidemic of man-hating going on. Just look at Maureen Dowd! Did I know that when she spoke at the 92nd Street Y, she packed the house while Elie Wiesel could hardly get people in to hear him? (No I didn't and I doubt it is true. Note to self: call the 92nd St Y and check in with the PR office.) And that terrible title of her book: Are Men Necessary? only stokes additional man-hatred. Could I imagine if a man had written a book called Are Women Necessary? He'd be pilloried!!

In the face of this rampant, rampaging race of princesses who longed to have their hindquarters snogged by hapless males -- and whose idea of recreation was guy-hating -- this enterprising He-Man, this social visionary, this enlightened prophet had a message: Stop the Madness. Ask me how.

As he yammered on, my Upper West Side brain began to wake up...and get really annoyed. It was not even 9:30 in the morning and some strange dude from the West Coast was basically spewing his hatred of my gender right into my tender ear. So obnoxious was he that I concluded that there was not a woman alive deserving of his loathing...not even such loathsome characters as Courtney Love or Anna Nicole Smith or Leona Helmsley or Imelda Marcos or Jackie G., the biggest bitch in my elementary school class at North Shore Hebrew Academy in Great Neck, or even Elsa, She-Wolf of the SS. Perhaps the poor schmuck had dated some of these babes! Yeah, that could kind of sour a guy's appreciation for regular girls.

Hey...aren't ya generalizing just a little bit? I ventured. None of the women I know are remotely the way you describe...

Women lie to each other, he asserted, cutting me off. They scheme and they compete with one another and they hide important information. But alone with me, they reveal themselves, they let their hair down, they stop playing games...they become naked, he said, his voice descending into a dramatic whisper.

As the word naked fell from his lips, I thought I heard the sound of his injured masculinity stirring to life. This was beginning to remind me of phone sex. (Not that I'd know, really...) Horrified yet oddly fascinated, I stayed on the line. Then, as if the conversation was not already weird enough, he began deconstructing naked, telling me that he meant it figuratively -- without artifice -- and, yes, literally. When a women talks to him, you see, there's always sexual tension. That's just a given. It oozes from his He-Man essence. Yet, being the fearless princess-slayer that he is, Mr. Refuses to Kiss Women's Asses is able to skillfully seque from sexual tension into seduction, bedding women who fall captive to his powerful, er... powers.

Listening to him, I began to wonder what was the matter with me. How come I didn't spend my every waking moment plotting Female World Domination? And what about my lovely teenage daughter, Middle Babe? No princess she, in fact, just this evening, she gave a powerhouse performance in her high school's production of The Princess and the Pea where, come to think of it, she starred as Princess Winnifred the Woebegone. Hmmm. Must ponder her playing the part of a princess. But my dear, sweet mother, MOB (mom of Bungalow Babe)! How could this strange man accuse her of crimes against MANkind?? And my beautiful friends, especially the single ones who have been far more screwed over by the men in their lives than the other way around!! And my dearly departed Grandmas! Never had a day passed when these selfless balabustehs weren't nurturing the men in their lives!

Enough, I heard my grandmothers whisper in my ear from the Other World where I sincerely hoped they were having eternal mani-pedicures after a lifetime of hard work. Get off the phone, darling. Stop wasting your time with this yutz.

And so, before Mr. Misogyny could go one step further, I interjected, telling him that our conversation had come to an end. I could not work with him. It wasn't a good shidduch.

The marriage metaphor must have thrown him, because he stammered. That's an interesting choice of words, he said, his voice suddenly panicky. Yeah, it's the way we princesses blow off guys here in New York, I thought, turning on my computer.

But why? he whined as I started reading my e-mail. The guy didn't need a publicist. He needed a Clockwork Orange-like procedure to deprogram his hate-poisoned brain.

But I wasn't going to tell him that. He might not get the allusion. And so, inspired by his forthright candor earlier in the conversation, I decided to return the favor.

"Because you're a complete jerk," I said, as the line fell blessedly silent and his words evaporated in the restored momentum of Monday morning.

___________________________________________________________________

*When not residing within the blogosphere of Bungalow Babe in the Big City, I run a public relations and marketing firm in NYC.

Skewer Me, Stephen!

Here's what I love about today's NY Times Week in Review section: The two leading stories nearly scared me to death and nearly made me laugh to death... nearly simultaneously. (go to www.nytimes.com)

Over half the cover of today's Week in Review section is dominated by a terrifying illustration of two gargantuan, Golem-like creatures engaged in mortal combat, fingers digging into each others' faces. Their figures blend into a primitively-rendered map of the Middle East -- from Kuwait and Saudi Arabia in the South to Turkey and Iran in the North. Guess which country the fighting Golems represent? The headline of the article is: What a Civil War Could Look Like.

The article, by Steven R. Weisman, won its front-page placement because of the ubiquity of the question being asked earlier this past week in the wake of the attack on the Shiite mosque in Samara: is Iraq on the brink of a civil war? Phrased any number of ways, this question opened up innumerable news broadcasts and was posed to pundits and politicians alike by concerned-looking television journalists. Naturally, it made its way onto several of this morning's highly-addictive Sunday morning political roundtables on television.

(Though I listened to the kaffee klatch chat that uber-cutiepie George Stephanapolous had assembled on This Week and tuned into CNN's Reliable Sources, I will admit to not having read Weisman's article yet, chiefly because the graphic nearly scared me to death and because I was moved to go to Ikea instead to buy a wall unit for Big Babe's room.)

If you look at that horrific image for more than five seconds, your adrenaline levels will start spiking and you'll be reaching for the nitro-glycerine pills, so I advise you to direct your gaze downward, past the paper's fold, where your equilibrium will be instantly restored by a reassuring photograph bearing the far-friendlier visage of political satire's reigning It-Boy -- Stephen Colbert.

Draped above this reassuring image (a clip from a recent broadcast when he is fake-interviewing Bill Parcell, Jr.) is the headline: Laugh, and the Voters Laugh With You, or at Least at You.

Colbert is huge. He's gargantuan. He's bigger than you-know-who. Rather than accept and enjoy this simple fact, however, journalists have been tripping over themselves recently trying to deconstruct his mystique, rendered all the more mystifying by the fact that he appears for only 30 minutes on a late-night slot...when many Baby Boomers are already en route to shluffy-land.

But there is no mystery in Colbert's monster fame. He is brilliant. He is fearless. He is original. He crafts his comedy out of a place that perceives our current political reality as utterly and dangerously screwed up. Through his shtick, he blows the whistle on hypocrisy, abuse of power, liars, idiots, egomaniacs and those who would opt for truthiness over truth. (Check out Marc Peyser's Newsweek article at: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11182033/site/newsweek/)

The one mystery about Colbert is, however, why politicians continue to agree to be interviewed by him when they have fairly certain proof that they are going to end up looking like morons when the Colbert Report's editors finish editing the footage. Moreover, knowing Colbert's uber-liberal weltanschuang, why would Republicans submit to requests for interviews, i.e. public humiliation before millions of viewers?

Such questions dogged me, robbing my soul of peace. Therefore, it is with tremendous gratitude-- and no small measure of relief -- that I salute Sheryl Gay Stolberg, author of the aforementioned NY Times article, for finally solving this mystery. To quote Ms. Stolberg: the show reveals an essential truth about Washington: being humiliated on national television can be better than not being on national television at all.

Whoa. That's sounding suspiciously S&M and low-self-esteem to me. Like, if my boyfriend beats me, it's better than him ignoring me? Also, it kinda reminds me of a recent analysis I saw on CNN of the Kid Rock/Scott Stapp sex-in-a-trailer with four skanky women (eww, eww, eww!!!!) video, which predicted that the scandal could catapult his career in much the same way that Paris Hilton's One Night in Paris video did for her. (Actually, I was unaware that she had a career and that it was, in fact, catapulted by the tape, but I'll accept the argument.)

Or is it just the "no such thing as bad publicity" ethic at work?

Cataloguing some painful pranks Colbert has played on his political interviewees ( he asked Massachusetts Democratic Congressman Barney Frank about his "wife"; he asked Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) if "somebody bigger" put him up to the idea of proposing anti-bullying legislation; he got the explosive James R. Moran (D-VA) to fake-throw a punch at him; he got Eliot L. Engle (D-NY) to allow him to comb his thick mustache), Stolberg turns to Republican strategist Rich Galen to offer some Rashi 'n Tosefot* on why his party's politicians bend over for Colbert's whip.

Galen notes that it is the young, hip congressional aides who are convincing their bosses to stretch their appeal to "Generation Y." Also, to lose their stodgy, humorless affect. One young turk, David All, the 26-year-old press secretary of Jack Kingston (R-GA), organized a whole pr- fest around Kingston's embarrassing 15 seconds of fame.

Evidently, there is no better way to reach the young 'uns and have a stab at pretending to possess a sense of humor than by being skewered by Colbert.

I think I'll go online and try to track down that Kid Rock video.

_________________________________________________________________

*Yeshiva world shorthand for commentary. Rashi -- Rabbi Shlomo Itzhaki -- was the famous 11th century French Biblical commentator; Tosefot are anonymous additional commentators. When used in the sentence, "Gimme the Rashi and Tosefot on that way-weird confrontation," it means, hey, dude, clue me in! What the #$% was that about????

The Magazine Antidote to Mad World Syndrome

Ah, Shabbos.

Also known as Shabbat or Sabbath, the day of rest is truly a mekhiah. (All new visitors to this blog are instructed to refer to the posting from February 23rd if unfamiliar with the meaning of mekhiah.)

The way I was raised, which was on the cusp between Conservative and Orthodox Judaism (known for a while as Conservadox), Shabbat ushered in a magical, work-free realm of delectable food, special meals, Saturday morning shul (synagogue) services followed by a thrilling kiddush -- a collation consisting of bowtie cookies, frosted brownies with walnuts, dense pastries shaped like maple leaves, topped with chocolate, herring with little cellophane-adorned toothpicks, gefilte fish and horseradish, tuna salad, egg salad and all the Dr. Brown's soda you could ever hope to drink -- Shabbos clothes and Shabbos shoes, which would be shed for playclothes and sneakers upon returning from shul, playdates with friends but best of all, hours upon hours of uninterrupted reading accompanied by noshing (snacking for the Yiddish-challenged).

There was no television, no phone conversations, no radio, no running of dishwashers or washing machines, no school work, no writing, no traveling by vehicle, no turning on or off of lights, no purchasing or exchanging of money...a real respite from the regular world of commerce and responsibility.

These days, my Shabbatot (plural of Shabbat, the Hebrew version of Sabbath) are composed of pretty much the same elements and my love and appreciation for the 25-hour zone grows exponentially with every year of my adult life. As a kid, I adored Shabbat, never finding it boring or restrictive, experiencing, in fact, sheer freedom in being able to read for hours lying down on my bed, my hand darting in and out of a bag of barbeque potato chips. As an adult, I find myself reaching for Shabbat in the middle of my work week, often praying for its speedy arrival, clinging to it when it arrives, mourning its departure at sundown on Saturday evening.

Shabbat is a time when all my responsibilities to others (except my immediate family) cease and I take refuge in this knowledge, curling up inside it. Hearkening to my childhood habit, I can usually be found on most Shabbat afternoons, or early in the morning before leaving for shul, curled up in much the same manner as I had when I was a child, reading for hours.

Truth to be told, the Shabbat reading I do these days is a bit less literary than that of my childhood when I devoured novels in one sitting. Though I am currently reading the Henry James collection, The Figure in the Carpet and Other Stories (Penguin Classics/1986) this week's Shabbos reading consisted of The New Yorker and the Weekend sections of the New York Times last night (respectable); The New York Times' Womens Fashion Spring 2006 supplement (a little less respectable) this morning; the rest of the paper minus the sports, real estate and business sections this afternoon (back to respectable); and Us Weekly (www.usmagazine.com) and InStyle (www.instyle.com -- completely egregious), which I read avidly in the last hour of Shabbos while sweating it out on the non-electrical Sharper Image stepper we retrieved from the garbage room last month.

Yes, I felt intellectually enriched by my intercourse with The New Yorker (hurrahs to David Remnick for his fine, if frightening Letter from the West Bank; Roz Chast for her hilarious Limited Edition Cards, and Jane Kramer for her Talk of the Town on the meshuganeh response of radical Muslims to the Danish cartoons of Mohammed...visit www.newyorker.com). And yes, Sam Apple's essay, No Laughing Matter, in The Funny Pages section of the Magazine made me guffaw and Leslie Camhi's highly readable if rambling essay in the Times's Women's fashion supplement completely captivated my attention (visit www.nytimes.com).

(Starting off as an essay on the late, great melodramatic actress Sarah Bernhardt, the piece segued into a discussion of her Jewishness and then opened up into a piece of Jewish beauty, Jews and beauty, Jewish designers, Eastern European supermodels with possible Jewish ancestry and the actress Rachel Weisz -- pronounced vice, Camhi helpfully instructs us -- who is proudly Jewish.)

Yes, I admit that I added a couple of books to my Must Read list after visiting with the Book Review supplement, read the op-ed page contributors (Maureen! How can you go on book tour at a time like this???!!! Now what am I going to discuss with my father after Shabbos???) and checked in with news from around the world.

But the biggest bliss of the day came from my perusal of InStyle and US Weekly, when my brain slipped into low gear, my jaw went slack and I was all about haircuts and cute little swingy skirts and which shoes to wear with what length pants and why Tom and Katie are NOT breaking up and how Angelina and Brad are so normal, not like a celebrity couple, and Demi Moore's fashion retrospective and Nick Lachey's reasons for suing Jessica for support and new skin products and a couple of dresses I'd like to try to track down at Loehmann's and...

As my feet trod upon the stepper and my pores pushed through perspiration, I looked at pictures and read captions, my entire body rejuvenating itself, my actual cells regenerating. Without the immediacy of television news or the internet, without the constant ringing of my cellphone and the urge to dash out the door to something or other, I was cloistered for a handful of hours in a Do Not Disturb zone, enabled by the religious laws governing Shabbat observance and my particular reading material.

When I emerged, I felt ready to return to my regularly-scheduled life. Fifteen minutes later, I marked the end of Shabbat (after the ceremony of Havdalah ...http://judaism.about.com/library/3_blessingsprayers/bl_havdalah.htm) by turning on my computer and diving headlong into the celebration of Mardi Gras in post-Katrina New Orleans, the mistrial of the woman who cut off her baby's arms and let the child bleed to death, the ongoing mayhem in Iraq, the suspected ricin found in the Dallas dormroom, the death of Don Knotts, South Dakota's imminent move to ban abortion and other dispatches from our mad, mad world.

Shabbat Shalom!

See you after sundown tomorrow night!

Right on Target

Are you familiar with the Yiddish word, mekhiah? Adapted from the Hebrew word for life-giving, the Yiddish version has a more pragmatic connotation: pleasure-giving. The proper use of the word mekhiah (meh-chai-eh) is demonstrated by the following paragraph:

"Shopping at Target is such a mekhiah! The store is so clean and well-laid out and the staff is so helpful and the prices are simply unbeatable! Since they opened the Target near my house, I've stopped going to W#$%^rt, which is a filthy, depressing store that showcases Christian right-wing books, exploits its workers and has refused to carry the morning-after pill. Plus, if you've ever been there at, say, 2 in the morning, you're bound to meet up with one of America's Most Wanted in the power tool aisle. Target sensibly closes its doors before these characters are on the loose."

If you are an American citizen, visitor or resident, chances are that you know all about Target (www.target.com), even if you have never visited one of its gajillion locations. Its clever ads and commercials, its simple yet riveting logo, its genius strategy of snagging high-profile designers such as Isaac Mizrahi, Philippe Starck, Luella Bartley and other seriously-cool names, its ubiquitous sponsorship of programs in the arts, education and social services, its amazingly affordable merchandise...coupled with its well-organized, well-stocked, airy and brightly-lit stores make it truly one of the most pleasurable shopping emporia I have ever experienced.

(Other shopping venues that win Bungalow Babe in the Big City A-list billing include IKEA (www.ikea.com); Trader Joe's (www.traderjoes.com) and Whole Foods (www.wholefoodsmarket.com), especially the branches located in Cambridge, Mass.)

I am moved to kvell about Target because earlier today I patronized the location in Central Valley, NY, about five miles from my summer dwelling at Rosmarin's Bungalows in Monroe, NY, the foothill of the Catskill Mountains. Piling Little Babe and Alfie the Pomeranian into our red Dodge Caravan mid-afternoon, we set off along the Palisades Parkway to visit our summer kuchalein (Yiddish for a small cottage, usually with a bed in the kitchen) -- and incidentally, return the stepping stool and unnaturally-shaped red bra I had bought a week ago at the Target in the Bronx.

Because it is such a mekhiah to shop at Target, Little Babe and I ended up making many spontaneous purchases in addition to returning the stepping stool and the unnaturally-shaped red bra. (Nothing frivolous. Mostly stuff on the order of Garnier Fructis shampoo; Bounty dinner napkins; Pria power bars; Yu-Gi-Oh cards; tons of stuff from the dollar section -- great for housegifts!; a Janis Joplin t-shirt for Middle Babe and an excellent Luella black miniskirt for me with strategically-placed zippers and crinoline.)

Following the mekhiah-inducing Target expedition, we headed over to our beloved bungalow at Rosmarin's, on School Road in Monroe, where we've been spending our summers since 1995, when Little Babe was born. Bereft of its canopy of leafy green, the cacophony of voices hailing from all five boroughs of New York (plus Miami) and the bungaleers who inhabit the 100 kuchaleins, the property looked downright dejected. Beneath our feet, the ground was cold and soggy and one could see through the branches of the trees of the mighty forest nearly all the way down to Walton Lake.

It is one of my favorite rituals to visit our summer cabin during the winter with Big, Middle and/or Little Babe, marking the visit on a piece of paper attached to the dead fridge by magnet. I usually scribble something like, "Feb. 23rd. Freezing yet beautiful. We cannot wait until summer!!" and when summer finally does arrive, the refrigerator notes seem like messages from the distant past, appearing as if by magic.

Today, Little Babe, Alfie and I fairly ran to our bungalow, marveling to find the electricity still flowing. "See? If we needed to escape Manhattan because of a terrorist attack or something, we could come up here and live, even during the winter!" I triumphantly told my ten-year-old son, detailing how, with the help of, oh, about 5 spaceheaters, we could keep the uninsulated shack toasty warm in the winter.

There is no rational reason to visit an unwinterized bungalow in the dead of winter. Everything is boxed up, the drawers are filled with mothballs and softener sheets (anti-mouse measures), the toilet and faucets are drained, the mattresses are standing on their sides, and the static cold makes it particularly uncomfortable to endure. Still, being inside our bungalow fills me with a speechless joy. It connects me to the past 11 summers and to my older children's childhood, but there is something more. It reminds me of my distant past and offers me a preview of the future.

I once told HOBB that when the time comes (at the age of 120-plus) I should like to be placed on a cushioned chaise lounge right in front of my Rosmarin's bungalow and be allowed to die with the memories of the best summers of my life surrounding me.

Don't pay attention to the time of the posting at the bottom of this entry. It is actually 3:35 am right now. I am up at this hour because I went to a literary event at the JCC of Manhattan (www.jccmanhattan.org) that lasted until nearly 10 pm and then was about to head out to NJ to pick up Middle Babe from a hockey game when I learned that BOMB (boyfriend of Middle Babe and star of the evening's hockey game) offered to drive my daughter back to NYC.

Naturally, I was relieved, chiefly because I didn't want to miss the Colbert Report (www.colbernation.com), which is an essential part of my daily life. And while Middle Babe assured me that BOMB was imminently about to drive her over the GW bridge, she in fact returned home at 1:30 pm, which was no problem except that we got into a conversation that lasted over an hour and here I am one hour beyond that, still blogging away.

Which might mean that my half-serious plan to take off by myself to Boston for the weekend via the Fung Wah bus (www.fungwahbus.com) might not materialize.

Still, it was worth it. All of it. The trip to Target and the trip to our bungalow and the literary event and the almost-trip to NJ and the Colbert Report and the conversation with my daughter. Especially the conversation with my daughter. A poignant sadness dwells between us at the prospect of her graduating from high school and leaving home at the end of the summer. Also, there is the highly-charged relationship of a mother and a daughter. Raising a girl has been a far more humbling experience than raising sons, I have found. I entered into the enterprise thinking that as long as I didn't duplicate the errors of my own upbringing, I would be blameless.

I have found out otherwise in ways that have stunned me.

As the hour approaches four, I consider the merits of grabbing three hours of sleep to bouy me through the upcoming day, then again, if I wait an hour, I can go work out at the JCC gym! Hmmm. Sleep...exercise...sleep...exercise. It's a tough call.

At this hour, Little Babe and HOBB have been asleep for centuries, and Middle Babe is only a recent inductee into slumber. The intermittent Amsterdam Avenue traffic outside my living room window creates a comforting aural backdrop; it is too early, or late, for honking horns or screeching brakes. Alfie is nowhere to be found, having sought refuge in some warm place, most likely the pile of laundry-bound shirts at the bottom on HOBB's closet. In his dorm room one block away, Big Babe (aka Adam) is probably awake.

Once upon a time, I used to wake up at this hour one day a week to write a column on the life of my family and I know at least one novelist who routinely wakes up to write every morning at 4. I can no longer imagine being able to work at such an hour! Still, it is a rare and marvelous feeling to be awake at this moment, to be alone with my thoughts, to move away from global concerns and focus, if only fleetingly, on such a momentous and bittersweet passage as my only daughter preparing to leave home.

It is, as they say in Yiddish, a mekhiah.

The World is Too Much With Us

The day began with news of a bomb attack on the Askariya mosque in Samarra, Iraq, an impressive, gold-domed house of worship, beloved by Shiite Muslims. The attack, which destroyed the mosque, managed to completely destabilize the country, resulting in rampaging riots, demonstrations and gangland-style violence against Sunnis Muslims, causing the deaths of about 15 civilians, including several imams.

By mid-day, talk was about Iraq being on the "brink of civil war." I hate to quibble with language, but I would offer a different word to describe what seems to be going on in Iraq right now and it would be pandemonium. Complete and utter chaos. Civil War is simply too, well, civilized, kinda like a planned thing. And are things really on the "brink" right now?? I'd say that the pandemonium in Iraq has some real momentum behind it. It is a living, breathing organism, fueled by a vengeance-bent, enraged nihilism.

Not that things are much better here in the US of UAE. Today's installment of the US port management drama revealed at least two terrifying facts:

• That Bush might not have known anything about this deal until it was fait accompli.
• And that, surprise, surprise, even without Osama's cousins controlling six US ports, only 5% of all containers coming into this country through our ports are even inspected.

How this is possible in a post 9/11 world under the watch of an Administration that loves to brag about how we haven't been attacked since 2001 defies my comprehension. If anyone can explain the situation to me, please weigh in below by pressing the comments button.

These are the questions that keep me awake and blogging at 1 a.m.

So, you might be wondering what all of this has to do with the picture of the cute and fluffy little Pomeranian puppy at the top of this entry. I'll tell you. The more insane the world becomes, the more essential becomes the time-honored role played by man's best friend. I'm completely serious here. As I write this blog in my dining room (because HOBB kicked me outta the bedroom, like, two hours ago, claiming that he wanted to go to sleep), I am saved from sheer despair by the presence of Alfie the Pomeranian, who is worriedly watching me as I file my post.

The scarier the news becomes, the more dependent I become upon my pint-sized Pom nestling in my lap, presenting his belly for a vigorous scratching and licking my feet when I return home from the gym. The picture up top is, in fact, exactly what Alfie looked like 6 years ago when we acquired him from a breeder in Liberty, NY, for Middle Babe's Bat Mitzvah. When the world is too much with me, I abandon it and enter into Alfie's realm of canine imperviousness.

It seems completely redundant to use the word cute together with Pomeranian, however, if you want a mega-dose of cuteness to help you overcome your angst, visit www.pomangels.com.

A note of clarification. Rereading the above, I wonder if I gave the wrong impression that I have spent the night fretting about current world events and doing nothing else. Not so!!! For one thing, I can happily report to having been a guest at the sumptuous residence of President Lee Bollinger of Columbia University to celebrate the creation of the Institute of Jewish and Israel Studies (see the resolution at http://www.columbia.edu/cu/senate/committees/education/jewishinst.htm).

The event was quite lovely and moving, allowing the university's leadership to breathe a sigh of relief now that the horrible drama of last year involving certain members of the MEALAC department and student accusations against them is long past. Professor Yosef Yerushalmi spoke elegantly in gratitude for the university's decision of naming a chair after him and I had a thoroughly enjoyable time chatting with members of the Columbia faculty and Jewish community, some of whom are personal friends.

Yet as I stood talking with a Jewish Studies professor and author, he pointed out a puzzling detail in the carpet upon which we were standing. And that is the pattern of swastikas around the perimeter of the carpet, woven into the rug most innocently, no doubt hailing from some pre-Nazi dynasty, perhaps India, or even Iraq, land of the legendary flying carpets.

But I quickly forgot about those pre-Nazi swastikas when I returned home to cook dinner for the clan (hamburgers, sauteed green beans and walnuts, pasta and salad), hang out with Little and Middle Babe and HOBB. I didn't think about them as the Colbert Report was getting underway and Alfie ran barking to the front door to herald a surprise visit from Big Babe (aka Adam) who had come from his dorm on East Campus to pick up some dry cleaning and say hi.

I didn't think about the swastikas at all, actually, until now, when I was reminded of them while composing this post. I am certain that they bear no significance, only a hint of irony, appearing weirdly underfoot at an event that attests to the eternal nature of Jewish history.

Port-obello Mushroom

Yeah, I admit it. It took me the better part of 24 hours to untangle this US port insanity. When I first heard about it yesterday, I was en route to the birthday party of NOBB#2 (the second oldest Niece of Bungalow Babe) in Great Neck and heard only a smidgen of the story before being cajoled by Little Babe to move the dial from NPR to Radio Disney. The news was so unbelievable that I figured I had heard wrong. (WHAT??? Handing over control of our ports to the UAE? NAH!!!)

Pushing the thoroughly incredible news from the forefront of my mind, I spent a charming evening with the five little N&NOBBs (nieces and nephews of Bungalow Babe), my beloved MOBB (mom of Bungalow Babe) and dear DOBB (dad of Bungalow Babe), heading back to Manhattan at 10:30 with a talkative Little Babe, then falling asleep within minutes of walking through the front door.

By morning, it was clear that I had heard correctly but with the verification of the news I was overwhelmed by a sense of disbelief. (WHAT??? Handing over control of our ports to the UAE? NAH!!!) Now that I've read dozens of articles and blogs, and listened to talking heads and pundits and press conferences with politicians on both sides of the aisle (special thanks to Wolf Blitzer and Lou Dobbs), I must conclude one of three things:

1-- That this inexplicable decision to hand over oversight of six major United States ports in New York, New Jersey, Philadelphia, Baltimore, New Orleans and Miami to a "subsidiary of United Arab Emirates government-controlled maritime management firm Dubai Ports World" (thanks for the wording, CNN.com: www.cnn.com) must be a bizarre, half-baked and swiftly boomeranging public relations strategy to win support among Administration-hating liberals.

2 -- That this inexplicable decision to hand over oversight of six major United States ports in New York, New Jersey, Philadelphia, Baltimore, New Orleans and Miami to a "subsidiary of United Arab Emirates government-controlled maritime management firm Dubai Ports World" (thanks for the wording, CNN.com: www.cnn.com) must have to do with Bush Family interests.

3-- That this inexplicable decision to hand over oversight of six major United States ports in New York, New Jersey, Philadelphia, Baltimore, New Orleans and Miami to a "subsidiary of United Arab Emirates government-controlled maritime management firm Dubai Ports World (thanks for the wording, CNN.com: www.cnn.com) must have to do with some scary-ass deal that none of us really wanna know about.

So, here's what I'm thinking. Unless #2 or #3 are actually true, Bush and some thinking-outside-the-box strategist (or strategists...perhaps those forward-thinking Bush twins?) musta come up with this counter-intuitive move, high-fiving each other after they dreamed up the concept, leaning back in their chairs as they fantasized about the PR shock 'n awe 'n admiration it would inspire around the world.

How else to explain why the president of the country that is on the Search and Destroy list of Arab and Muslim radicals choosing to compromise the security of his nation's ports by handing over a contract to the United Arab Emirates -- hometown of two of the 9/11 hijackers and homebase of the Dubai banks that the terrorists drew their funds from?

How else to explain the president that won/stole the second election by scaring the shit out of everyone about the imminence of another terrorist attack on our soil turning now to a country that is a known threat to the United States and basically handing them the keys to our house? Come on in. The kids are sleeping upstairs.

The Bush brainstormers must have been convinced that this move -- so bold, so unexpected, so liberal -- would win support from those nasty critics of wiretapping and racial profiling and US support of Israel. And, as Bush himself said in his Charles Lindbergh-like press conference aboard Air Force One today, it really looks bad around the world for America to oppose this deal just because DPW is a Middle East company and furthermore, he would exercise his veto power should Congress oppose him. Hrrmphh!

The bipartisan tsunami of outrage (credit to Dana Bash of CNN for using that apt and most 21st century word in her emotional dispatch this evening) to Bush's outta-touch-with-reality move today was most gratifying. I haven't especially liked Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist in the past, but I loved the guy today. Also lovely to behold were Rep. Peter King (R-NY) and NY Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY) standing shoulder to shoulder on the issue. King, incidentally, is no less than the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee.

And speaking of homeland security...isn't it frickin' weird that the pasha of paranoia -- Michael Chertoff -- is standing foursquare behind this bizarro proposal??? With no details being released on the process that his office went through to investigate DPW, I would expect him to be a wee bit more sensitive to the American public whom he managed to scare to death over the past few years and offer some proof of DPW's America-friendly agenda.

Okay, I gotta move on...

Some highlights from my day: I got the chance to try out the Ab Lounger (As Seen on TV...check out http://www.fitnessquest.com/scripts/cgiip.exe/WService=/link?src=KWPABUC) at my gym tonight. How cool is that! They had just unpacked the contraption when I finished with my low-tech crunches on the mat. Timidly, I asked the highly-muscular trainer Keith if I could test-drive the Ab Lounger and 25 crunches later, I know my six-pack impressed the hell out of him.

Following in the footsteps of this cool experience, I hailed the cab of an extremely joyful Egyptian driver by the name of Ahmed Ibrahim. Extremely joyful and extremely famous, it turns out. Plying me with laminated newspaper articles, he told me that he is the Matchmaker Cabbie (check it out at http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2002164720_cabbie30.html) and this is his last week of driving a cab because he is going to have a television show about him.

Yeah? I inquired, squinting to read the newsprint in the dark of the backseat. Well, he replied. The TV show would take time, but a movie would be coming out. Mazel tov, I told him, though not in those exact words. I could make out the masthead of People Magazine and the Wall Street Journal. Yup, he was the real deal. A celebrity cabbie. "Google me," he urged me as I got off at my stop, right across the street from Columbia University.

I thought it was a good idea to refrain from asking him what he thought about Bush turning over the control of our country's ports to an Arab country.

The Morning After

Day two and all is jiggy here in the blogosphere of Bungalow Babe in the Big City. Today is Presidents Day and Little Babe went off to vacation camp in Riverdale with his best buddy, while Middle Babe went off to a full-day rehearsal at her high school for the senior class's production of Once Upon a Mattress. Middle Babe plays Princess Winnifred the Woebegone. Big Babe has classes at Columbia. Husband of Bungalow Babe (HOBB) is reviewing applicants for the graduate program where he teaches and when I finish this entry, I will return to my work, drafting a press release to announce a major literary award.

Kudos to Krugman

Paul Krugman, that is, for hitting the nail on the head with his excellent NYTimes Op-Ed column today, The Mensch Gap (www.nytimes.com). I couldn't say it better, Mr. Krugman and I wish I'd said it first. There is an extreme absence of menschlichkeit (menschiness) in the current administration. Or to quote him directly:

"Be a mensch," my parents told me. Literally, a mensch is a person . But by implication, a mensch is an upstanding person who takes responsibility for his actions.

The people now running America aren't mensches.

In the course of his essay, Krugman delivers his anti-mensch list:

"Dick Cheney isn't a mensch."
"Donald Rumsfeld isn't a mensch."
"Michael Chertoff isn't a mensch."
"Michael Leavitt isn't a mensch."

Krugman charts the innumerable fuck-ups of the administration -- from the Twilight Zonish flipping of blame for Cheney's gun-gone-wild onto the victim, 78-year-old Harry Whittington to the VeePee's misleading info on WMD's to the screw-up that is the war (or American occupation) in Iraq to the destruction of New Orleans by FEMA's inaction in the face of Katrina to the "catastrophic" prescription drug plan to the holding of prisoners of dubious guilt at Gitmo.

Posing the pressing yet poignant question, "where have all the mensches gone?" Krugman goes on to deliver his blow of blows:

"The character of the administration reflects the character of the man at its head. President Bush is definitely not a mensch; his inability to admit mistakes or take responsibility for failure approaches the pathological."

Amen, Mr. Krugman. America hears you.

In the Beginning...

Welcome! Wilkommen! Bienvenue! Shalom!

A momentous day in the life of Bungalow Babe in the Big City. I borrowed my son (Adam J. Goldman -- visit ajgoldmann.blogspot.com)* from his regularly-scheduled life as a Columbia University student and asked him to explain the inner workings of blogs to this time traveler born in 1960. Ten minutes later, I think I've got it under control. Enough, at least, for the rudimentary aspects of blog-keeping, that is, the verbal entries. Such advanced matters as linking, pictures and other stuff will hopefully follow as my cyber-proficiency increases.

Ya might be wondering, though, with this disclaimer, how I got that way-hot image of Stephen Colbert onto the blog. The answer is that I copied it from my wallpaper. No, silly, not from my actual walls (though, come to think of it...) but from my laptop, where it recently replaced the way-boring image of Stonehenge that had been there since I bought the machine.

Stephen In the Shower became my wallpaper this past Friday after I copied it onto my desktop after spending, oh, about an hour cyber-stalking Stephen while I should have been doing at least twelve other, more pressing tasks, including working. Yes, life is a series of difficult decisions and we must learn to live with the consequences.

I won't dwell on my admiration-obsession with Stephen Colbert and The Colbert Report and honestly would not even have written about him/it right now were it not for the fact that I copied this image onto my very first blogger entry as Bungalow Babe in the Big City sorta, almost as a test. So, please, let's move on...

About this blog: I intend it as an experiment. Not in the pretentious, experimental-art way, but in the "let's see how it goes" pragmatic way. As someone whose life is fairly filled with commitments to work, family, physical fitness and friends (sometimes, scarily, in that order), I'm frankly a bit worried about committing to the upkeep of this blog...though not worried enough to refrain from even embarking upon the journey of blogging.* So before you grow too attached to Bungalow Babe in the Big City...

It is the evening of a magnificent day in Manhattan -- sun-drenched, shimmering, shockingly cold. I spent the majority of the day at the Museum of Jewish Heritage (www.mjhnyc.org) in lower Manhattan, drawn by the new exhibit Life in Shadows, about hidden children during the Holocaust. Going through the exhibit with Little Babe, my ten-year-old son, I was exceptionally moved throughout, in fact, I found it hard to keep from weeping. Anyone who has a child or loves children will be touched by the stories of the Jewish parents who made the brave and risky decision to hand their children over to Christian families, orphanages, monasteries and other venues, knowing that the chances of either's survival and eventual reunion were slim to non-existent.

Tonight, I want to debrief Little Babe on his reaction to the exhibit.

There is much to say about the Museum of Jewish Heritage, which is a cultural treasure. The location and the architecture alone make a trip there completely worthwhile. Just walking along the southwestern-facing windowed corridor on the third floor of the museum was a treat, offering a wide view of New York bay, the Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island, New Jersey and more. Their permanent exhibition explores the contributions of Jews to world culture and it was fun reviewing the roster of writers, composers, filmmakers, directors, actors, singers, dancers, conductors and other cultural icons who were Jews.

There is much to say, but I'd like to focus my comments on Ours to Fight For, which celebrates and documents the role of Jewish American GI's in WWII. Aside from the artful layout of the exhibit, which takes you into rooms and shacks and through corridors, and the cool assemblage of artifacts, weapons, uniforms, documents, newsreels, mezuzahs, dogtags, photos and videotaped interviews with the GI's, one cannot help but admire the unified spirit with which the leadership and citizenry of America entered into WWII, confident in its knowledge that its soldiers and forces were engaged in a battle with sheer evil.

Viewing this exhibit in the winter of 2006 -- against the backdrop of the travesty of the War in Iraq made me painfully away of how America has plummeted from greatness during the administration of George W. Bush.

Hey, I could go on, but need to get to the gym (www.jccmanhattan.org) if I am gonna work off the donut I ate mid-afternoon. My daughter Middle Babe announced that she is en route home for dinner with her bf so I just popped some Trader Joe's spanakopita (www.traderjoes.com) into our oven and will wash some lettuce for salad before abandoning my family for my rendezvouz with the treadmill. We tend to eat dinner together most nights, but tonight is the Sunday evening of a vacation weekend so I'm jumping ship. Anyway, HOBB (Husband of Bungalow Babe) made some pierogie for Little Babe and Adam (aka Big Babe) is making some gourmet concoction which smells pretty damn good. I'd better get outta here before I get seduced into eating anything more!!!!

Thanks for reading this far, if you have indeed read this far.


Bungalow Babe in the Big City




* You'll be introduced to my younger children as Middle Babe (daughter, age 17) and Little Babe (son, age 10) in due course. I was going to call my oldest son, Big Babe, but he's already 21 and has his own blog, so he can fend for himself.

** I first identified the urge to blog sometime over the summer while staying at my actual bungalow -- Rosmarin's in Monroe, NY. A few summers back I had a weekly column called Bungalow Babe in the excellent local paper, The Times Herald Record (www.th-record.com). Borrowing the name of my column for my blog seemed a stroke of genius; it enabled me to export a bit of my summer sensibility back to the Big City, where I spend the majority of the year.

In any case, I have been too busy and cyber-intimidated to create the blog until today when I came back from my visit to the Museum of Jewish Heritage to find Adam rifling through his old papers in a frantic search of some (very fine) poetry he had written two years ago and which he feared lost when his computer crashed last year. Turns out, he had e-mailed the poems to me while I was living in Oxford, England and I was able to locate them and e-mail them back to him. In gratitude, he shared his expertise with me and...voila!!!