[lit-ideas] Re: Hollaback Girl

  • From: JimKandJulieB@xxxxxxx
  • To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Mon, 13 Jun 2005 03:29:34 EDT

 
<<We  were at a Humanistic Mitzvah ceremony, which was heartbreaking and good
at  the same time. >> 
I'm curious about your terminology,  which I have not encountered before.  
"Humanistic Mitzvah ceremony".   This is a reform congregation?  
reconstructionist?  Something else new  to me? 
Julie Krueger 


========Original  Message========     Subj: [lit-ideas] Re: Hollaback Girl  
Date: 6/12/05 11:43:57 P.M. Central Daylight Time  From: 
_ritchierd@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx (mailto:ritchierd@xxxxxxxxxxxxx)   To: 
_lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx 
(mailto:lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx)   Sent on:    
on 6/12/05 5:59 PM, Erin Holder at  erin.holder@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

> Aha!  I knew this song had  profound meaning.
>  http://www.ocweekly.com/ink/05/35/music-stacy.php
> 
Funny.  Very  funny.

What have we been doing?  In the pouring rain the new  Portland Rose Queen
began her reign with the usual parade which lacked, among  the assembled
throng, any and all representatives of the Greenberg/Ritchie  clan.  You, of
course, have been waiting, with bait on your breath, to  hear whether we're
talking Queen Bosombath (a South Asian name, I kid you  not) or Queen A. N.
Other.  The answer is that they chose a blonde Irish  girl, Katelyn Jean
Callaghan.  Somehow the Ohio State Alumni marching  band was including among
the umpteen thousand tuba players that sloshed their  way forward toward
Goose Hollow or wherever the parade ends (it's been a good  while since we've
attended).  It really was a lot of rain.

We  were at a Humanistic Mitzvah ceremony, which was heartbreaking and good
at  the same time.  The boy did a fine job.  The girl did too, talking  about
her father's village in Bavaria, which had a Hitler Youth camp that  was
turned into a resettlement center for those who survived  concentration
camps.  Some people elected to go no further, and so the  father grew up with
an odd mix of folk around him--conservative Catholic  Bavarians, among whom
there were probably early supporters of Hitler, and  Jews who made it
through.  The father married an American Jew, came to  live here, became a
cardiologist.  He had been in practice a matter of  months when he was
diagnosed with a brain tumor.  I can't recall how  long ago that was, six
months perhaps.  What was clear to all, when he  came to the podium to say
how proud he was of his daughter, was that the  tumor was pressing on speech
and motion centers.

After the ceremony,  we went on to a party to celebrate Sarah's graduation.
Sarah, Eve and Mike's  firstborn, was the first baby I liked enough to think
that fatherhood might  be for me.  And here she was, out of school and headed
to a year in  Israel.  We asked her to promise that she wouldn't join the
army.   She didn't.  But she did read from a graduation gift, which you  might
enjoy:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/060961021X/ref=sib_dp_pt/103-6950553-0399000
#reader-page  

David Ritchie
Portland,  Oregon

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