The Man with the Coal-Covered Lips – A Poem for Haftarah Yitro by Rick Lupert
The Man with the Coal-Covered Lips – A Poem for Haftarah Yitro by Rick Lupert
The Man with the Coal-Covered Lips – A Poem for Haftarah Yitro by Rick Lupert
Debbie Tenzer was having lunch with several girlfriends when the conversation got heated. \”We all had such different views on where the country was headed.
Michael Gabai is on a quest. The owner and administrator of Ayres Residential Care Home has spent the last two weeks calling physicians, senior centers, grocery stores and pharmacies in search of flu shots for about half of the 18 residents in his facilities who have been unable to get one.
I was thinking about my friend Lillian Ross last week as I was driving over the Golden Gate Bridge on my way north to an enzyme bath and massage in an outdoor Japanese tea house in Occidental. (I was celebrating freedom after submitting my manuscript for a book on families and family life.) Lillian\’s the one who, when asked by her children what she wanted on her 70th birthday, told them that she always had this desire to walk across the bridge with them.
What is there about klezmer music that sends feet flying and excitement levels of certain Jewish audiences soaring? Nostalgia for the past or a just-found fondness for a \”new\” music\”? Whatever it is, when the klezmer band struck up a \”Freylach,\” almost instantly, a woman in a red baseball cap jumped to her feet, raised her arms to the sky and began bouncing joyfully to the music. She was quickly joined by someone in a jaunty straw hat and a T-shirt emblazoned with the word \”Danceaholic.\” Soon, there was an impromptu circle of happy bouncers — young and old — stepping lively under the warm California sun.
Little girls at a San Fernando Valley Jewish preschool report for circle time in midriff tops and lipstick. In Hollywood, a teen-ager acquires a tattoo, a designer backpack and a baby within a year of her arrival here from rural El Salvador. A \”soccer mom\” at a park in Van Nuys chats blithely about buying her 17-year-old daughter breast implants for her birthday. \”This is the real world,\” she says in response to my look of disbelief.
My daughter and I were driving through Koreatown again. Five years had passed since the first Rodney King verdict, since the riots, since the day we\’d first driven these same streets, with their smoldering buildings and the militia standing guard. She noted every new building and every lot that remained vacant.\n