Is This Thing On? by annie newman

All Aboard!

We've said it before and we'll say it again: travel is no pleasure. 

Why, then, is so much of our life spent on the road?

It is an odd conjunction of circumstances, none of which you will find interesting.

 For one thing, our contractor Odillio has been bring the Old Newman Place up to code for so long that they've actualy changed the code twice since we started. Ha, ha! 

No, seriously, we knew when we bought the place that it was only "turn-key" in the sense that you could put a key in the lock (if you wished) and turn it, but the door would probably fall away from you and the wall fall over you, like the old Buster Keaton gag. And the rest of the neighborhood would laugh their tails off but you yourself would not be so happy.

For the past four years we only took care of emergencies. Then our lamented Mom left us a certain amount of money and we started re-doing the house.

At certain points it has become necessary for us to leave the house. Sometimes this is because we are beginning to exhale, as well as inhale, plaster dust.

Sometimes it is because, as much as we love Odillio and his crew, we feel that if we hear one more Spanish pop-gospel tune in the middle of the night (9 AM), we might run amok with a staple gun in our mouth, and it won't end prettily.

We also want to travel now because we have rarely travelled in the past.

When we were a child, our parents loved traveling and, even more inexplicably, they loved traveling en famille. This, although we were the child most likely to need a potty break halfway through a traffic jam in the Lincoln Tunnel, and our brother became hysterical with fury if his London Broil touched his peas.

As we grew older, we hated travel more and more. This was because we were constantly being sent places. Camp in Canada. College in Central New York. Our Brother's College in Illinois, to disengage him from the hands of a gold-digger.

When we found ourself ensconced in a damp bedroom off the Gloucester Road because someone felt we should study abroad, we re-enacted that scene from "Gone with the Wind", except this time God was witnessing the fact that we would never travel against our own wishes, ever again.

Therefore, on Thursday we are taking a train to Washington, DC.

Former President with an unnamed friend.

Schleppin' 'Cross the Wilderness

"Wait. Is there gonna be a test on this?"

We don't like to make comments about our friend JC, who is a very smart man and much larger than ourself. But the man complains a lot. He truly does.

Last night, f'r'instance, he was Twittering from his seder. which already is going to get on God's nerves. But it might have been okay if his tweets has consisted of comments like : "This haroseth is incredibly yummy" or "Memo to self-do not actually eat bitter herbs".

Instead, we heard nothing but complaints.

"Let my people go...out for a sandwich!"

"My stomach is rumbling so loud it drowned out two choruses of 'Dayanu'!"

"I swear to God that hard-boiled egg is a gonner if I don't get some brisket within the next five minutes!"

The fact is...and anyone who has seen The Ten Commandments can bear me out on this...the Exodus was not a journey for sissies.

First of all, we (not just ourself this time, we mean all the Jewish people) had to leave the house without packing. Our own mother, never a vain woman, couldn't leave the house without fifteen minutes of makeup and hairdressing, and, as to some of our more princessy friends, we think they would rather be caught by Pharoah's henchmen than be seen in their gear from spinning class. So already the complaints would start.

Our bff La Skolnique ("Chava the Peacemaker") would have to run back twice to see she had turned off the stove (had the camel pee on the fire) underneath the tzimmes. Which no one would eat anyway, because it looked like mortar and reminded them too much of work.

JC (or, as he would have been known in Biblical times, "Joshua the Fresser") would have demanded to be carried aloft by his handmaidens, claiming some old stonelaying injury; his comments ("So who told you to bring the half-baked bread? Half-baked gefilte fish would have been okay but why the bread? Did anyone remember the half-fermented wine?") would make his wife and child beg for Egyptian citizenship.

You see how tiresome this would get? And he wouldn't be the only one. 

Our brother, Pesche With the Open Mouth, would be lecturing his adorable two sons (Sholem the Pure and Mordecai the Yeller) about the true meaning of the holiday, whilst his wife, Judith the Balabusta, would illustrate with healer-approved tub toys.

"Did anyone bring noseplugs? I've got a deviated septum!"

Over at our part of the caravan, we ("Hannah the Unpaid") would be trying to comfort our Beautiful Daughter ("Tauba the Annoying"...once you start these things it's really difficult to stop)...while we searched high and low for her father, "Baruch the Messy", who, we hoped, brought her prescription manna.

Our only point here is that Passover could be a lot worse, so everyone pipe down and pass the affikomen. And if you don't know what that is, you weren't on the Exodus anyway. You get to tell the jokes on Sunday.