"... a failure to c'municate."

Listening to Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana. The most well-known movement to this piece is the stirring “O Fortuna,” which anyone who’s ever watched TV would recognize instantly. This music has been the soundtrack to countless curve-hugging sport utilities; repugnant, hateful children watching their spaghetti fall to the floor like so much Italian intestine, only to have mother and her Bounty© scrub away at the mess; and the insides of showers that were apparently the site of numerous gruesome murders, the blood and plaque splattered hither and yon, unable to seep down a drain impossibly clogged by hair (or teenage/middle-aged male sloth), thus facilitating a miraculously powerful new 409 or Lime Away. “I’ll write the most epic music of the 20^th century,” Orff must have said to himself, “so that it may be mutilated and parodied by relentless capitalism.” Ok, maybe he wasn’t that dramatic. But he was German, and born of a German philosophical background: in other words, we’re shocked that the world hasn’t completely gone to pot, but it probably will within 10-15 years. More beer, please.

Today’s entry could have been titled More Fun with Jews, or Pepperoni Pandemonium, or even Kosher Komedy of Errors.

You see, the Symphony recently completed it’s 2005-2006 concert series with a grand production at Hollywood’s Ford Amphitheatre, an atmospheric 2000-seat venue with a lush and dramatic backdrop of cypress, oak, and many other species of Californian botanical treasure. It’s a nice fucking place.

To prepare for this event, my boss decided to stage her rehearsals at the temple. A sort of mall of Judaism, there was more than enough room in the social hall for a large ensemble. Besides, where better to rehearse the Jewish Symphony than a temple? But I digress: this entry is much more about the food brought to the rehearsal, not the event itself. But I thought I’d set the scene.

For this concert, which featured Israeli composers and performers, the Symphony flew a number of Israeli musicians to Los Angeles. These performers were housed in hotels throughout the city, and had arrived an hour early to the rehearsal so that they could get to know one another. I was charged with feeding them. The trouble starts:

“Go ahead and call for pizza,” my boss said. “But you can’t have it delivered—nothing unkosher can be brought into the temple, so you’ll have to go pick it up, and the temple administration will be none the wiser.”

I understood that message in this way: when buying pizza for many people, and these people are unavailable for an in-depth questioning as to their pizzatic preferences, it is customary to order standard, unexciting ingredients. You might go wrong with pineapple or anchovies, so you play it safe and get pepperoni. Now, of course I knew that if we were playing by the kosher rules (which we obviously were not, as evidenced by her “none the wiser” thought line), pepperoni (which is made from the meat of a very slaughtered and very cloven-hoofed pig) would be off-limits. However, I took her message to mean that her feeling was that few Jews are strictly kosher. Ergo, a pepperoni pizza (the gold standard of every childhood pool party), while unkosher, would bother only the temple big-wigs—hide it from them, and everyone’s happy as clams. So I’ll quickly recap, if that was at all tough to follow:

• She says, “Order pizza, but go pick it up so as to hide it from the Kosher Police.”
• I think, “Well yes, of course, as the standard random-group-of-people pizza is Pepperoni, which is made of pork. Most people aren’t strict kosher adherents, though, and won’t care if there’s some cooked swine on their food, so this clever ruse to sneak the pizza in will work just dandy-like.”

Now comes the real meat (no pun intended) of the story. As it turns out, any and all run of the mill pizza joint fare (ie cheese) is ALSO UNKOSHER. So somehow, I, as a goy, was supposed to understand the minutiae of her rule-breaking… another set of bullets, I think, this time fancier (because I like to pretend I’m an aesthete):

v Rule to break: ALL pizza has been tagged by the kosher laws as being unsuitable for Jewish consumption, therefore it may not be permitted to enter temple grounds.

o Supervisor conveniently leaves out the word “ALL,” so that the Catholic-reared intern interprets this to mean “steamy pig flesh is ok so long as no one finds out about it.”

v How supervisor envisioned the rule being broken: Intern will order cheese pizza, because although unkosher, it is somehow less unkosher than pepperoni. Everyone knows this.

And so an incredible chain of misunderstanding leads to this unfortunate and frightening scene:

Although possessed of a circumcised penis, I unwittingly and very un-Jewishly drive to Ameci’s Pizza and pick up my order of 2 large pepperoni pies.

I arrive at the temple with my bounty (or my kill, rather, as the food was covered in FRESHLY MURDERED MEAT PRODUCT!)

I ready the feast in the rehearsal room and then leave to finish some office work in the few minutes before everyone arrives. While walking through the hallway, I encounter my boss.

“Oh,” say I, “I wasn’t sure what everyone would like… I hope pepperoni is ok.”

I’ll pause here to try and decide how best to illustrate the ensuing chaos. You can help me (and yourselves) by envisioning those precious moments when you are sent into shock by unexplained rage.

One would have thought I had said, “I wasn’t sure what everyone would like… I hope human feces and toxic waste product from Lake Michigan is ok.”

She turned on her heels fast enough to make the Temple Donor Tree come off the wall (it didn’t really, but it could have, is all I’m saying. God, have some imagination), and threw her hands into the air. She waved her hair about in anguish, her fingers clutching some unknown horror as she yelled, “NO! Oh my god, no! It’s pork! It’s pork! Take it back take it back! Don’t argue Carl just do it! They’ll KILL me! Quick, before they open the box oh GOD they haven’t opened the box have they?! I don’t care what you do with it GET IT OUT GET IT OUT!!!!!”

By this time she had grabbed both my shoulders and was pushing me back into the tainted room that was now filled with the putrid stench of cured pig muscle. And I was seething. I was so frustrated with what has become indicative of her lack of communication that I grabbed the pizzas and stomped past her without saying a word. (I didn’t march-stomp, just walked deliberately. I’m not 4).

I took the pizzas back into the office and set them down (deliberately) on my desk. My coworker looked shocked. “What’s going on?” she queried.

In response, I dove my hand into the top box and scraped more than a handful of pepperonis into my grasp. Casting a bitter glance towards the door, I glared at the mezuzah (the elongated boxes that adorn Jewish doorjambs… I won’t assume that as goy, you’ll necessarily know this!), so that the temple gods would have to watch my blasphemy, and without blinking or wasting any time, I shoved that entire handful of motherfucking swine into my mouth. Oh, I savored it. Oh! by my troth and my word as a man of honor I tasted every sweet spice and note of smoky flavor. The grease and cheese remains ran down my chin as I greedily broke the law of a whole faith—this being the only way I could think of, in my incredible churning frenzy of anger, to stick it to my boss.

I’m usually ambivalent to pizza. This… this! was the most delicious goddamned pizza I’d ever had the pleasure of wrapping my lips around. And I didn’t even eat the bread or sauce. Only the meat. Only the filthy meat which is somehow more filthy than cheese by itself and I’m supposed to know this by some kind of magical osmosis of living in the city with the largest Jewish population in the western hemisphere!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

And with that, my story concludes. I have resolved to be more culturally aware from now on.

I’m not listening to anything because in order to relive my outrageous ire, I had to have total silence. But I think I’ll put something soothing on now. Like Strauss’s Vier letzte Lieder. Hear Jessye Norman sing them and you’ll never look back. I was going to play Wagner, simply because HIS MUSIC ISN’T ALLOWED IN ISRAEL JUST LIKE THE SEARED AND DELICIOUS FLESH OF THE HOG, but that would only fan the fire, and I wanted calm. Ahh.