21/3/97

How Purim Was... And Will Be

Purim has changed, thanks to Walt Disney and Saddam Hussein.

    I know exactly what's going to happen.
    "Waaaaaaa!" It will be Donna first. Or Nomi. Or maybe my wife.
    It will be 5:40 in the morning, which is about the time they wake up and about halfway through my sleep cycle. No matter. I will be given the gift of an early start. "Grrrr!" (That'll be me.)
    My wife will snarl at the kids: "I've had it with you three," and call it a day even before her first snort of caffeine. 
    Two will be wrestling and the third wailing, or two of them wailing and the third wrestling. I will become involved.
    "Make them stop," my wife will say to me in a tone that suggests I made them start in the first place. "I can't stand this bickering anymore."
    "Stop."
    And they will stop. My wife will hate me for making them stop just like that.
    I will then do something stupid: I will say "What's this all about?" before having deflated my bladder.
    And they will answer:
    "I wanna be Pocahontas and Mummy promised an' I even told all my friends I was gonna be Pocahontas which I have to be because they're all going to be Pocahontases also but last year when me and my sisters were Pocahontases Donna spilled raspberry juice on her costume and it looks like blood and so this time Donna took my Pocahontas costume and I know it's mine because it doesn't have raspberry juice on it but then Nomi said I look like a stupid Pocahontas and I love Pocahontas more than Nomi so I hit her and she hit me so please punish her."
    "Not true! Not true!  Don't listen to her Daddy that's not raspberry juice it's peepee and it's Odelia's and I don't wanna wear it, I want my Pocahontas costume which Donna's wearing because it fits me just perfect and anyway everybody will just laugh at us if we go to school like three Pocahontases and Pocahontas wasn't a triplet she was only a onelet like the movie said so make that stupid stupid stupid sister take it off NOW!"
    "Yeah but Daddy --"
    "Sorry, Donna, I'd love to hear it but I really have to go to the bathroom."
    "Peepee or kakee?" (They're at that age.)
    I will then attempt to take a long, tepid bath, or maybe I'll shave with the plucking method, but it won't work because my wife will get me the hell out of there to Sort Things Out.
    And that will be how Purim starts.
    It won't get much better.
    I could check with my mother, but as I recall Purim wasn't like this when I was a kid. For one thing, I don't think a Jewish child in history ever dressed as a 17th century squaw. Take any 10 kids back in my day and seven of them would be Esther or Mordechai, a kid or two might be Vashti or Haman, just to be contrary, and you might get a mom who wants her kid to stand out by dressing him as the Jolly Green Giant or Fred Flintstone or Phyllis Diller.
    That was then. That was before Disney stole Purim.
    I will ask my girls if they'd like to dress up as Queen Esther instead. They will say that's a dumb idea, nobody dresses up as Queen Esther. Alright, then, one of you can be Pocahontas, one of you --
    "NO!" That will be my wife, horrified at what I am about to involve her in. But it will be too late.
    "Okay, I'll be Sleeping Beauty."
    "No, I wanna be Sleeping Beauty."
    "I'll be Sleeping Beauty and Pocahontas and you can be the Hunchback of Notre Dame."
    "Waaaaa! Nomi called me a Hutchbank. Waaaaa!"
    About here, I'll lose it. "If you don't all want to be Rapunzel and find yourselves locked up in a tower then shaddap!"
    I am, I admit, a mere man, and I can't fathom why six-year-old females fantasize about being svelte, nubile, raven-haired goddesses of innocence. Maybe it's too close to my own fantasies. (Ooooh, maybe that's why my wife is so irritable about it. I mean, the girls aren't exactly fantasizing about being a middle-aged mommy. For that matter, I don't live up to their swashbuckling image of a male either.)
    Finally, my wife will come up with a diplomatic solution, and the girls (by now worn out) will pronounce themselves satisfied. They'll all be Pocahontas each with a designer raspberry-juice stain in the shape of a heart (my wife should get Mother of the Year award for that), and I will give each one a hug, tell them how terrific they look and stagger back to bed, probably to dream of myself as an Indian chief with squaws dressed in skimpy buckskins running amok in my teepee.
    Later, when I drive to work, I will wonder if I was still dreaming. Squaws will be running amok in the streets of Jerusalem. The city will look like a movie backlot during the making of “Disney's History of the World.”
    That evening, I'll come home, kiss my kiddies and flick on the TV, or the computer, or the microwave.
    "Daddy," a Pocahontas will say, "we're going to shul with our gragars because of Haman's name."
    "Have fun."
    At which point "they" will explain that "we" includes "me."
    Uh-uh, I will say.
    My wife will tartly ask what kind of a Jewish father am I to miss out on the Purim experience.
    I will growl ... remembering the last time I got suckered in by that. It was my worst experience in a combat zone. When did kids start going to shul packing live ammunition? Back in my day, we had gragars and horns and if that wasn't noisy enough we could boo too. Call me a cranky old fogey, but guns that look real, sound real and operate with plastic ammo laced with real dynamite should be banned from a house of worship. A synagogue is not the place for a simulated Iranian revolution.
    And I will smile ... remembering the greatest day I have ever spent in this country: Purim 1991. That morning, we awoke to the news of our modern-day Haman's defeat; the War of Nerves ended with the announcement that we could unseal our sealed rooms and put away our gas masks. That afternoon, we took our girls downtown for the first time since their birth, six months earlier and two blocks away. It was a crisp, sunny Friday. Jerusalemites spilled out into the streets, ebullient, intoxicated, liberated from our siege mentality. And niggling even the most skeptical mind was that, by sheer quirk of fate, that morning's newspapers and that evening's Megila reading had eerily juxtaposed.
    "Daddy," my children will say, "tell us the story of Esther and Mordechai and Haman." And I will gather them 'round and begin: "Twice upon a time, six years ago and 2,340 years before that..."