We went to a Bar Mitzvah on a boat yesterday, and let me just say, first of all: I don’t like boats.
I’m not afraid of water, I don’t get seasick, I’m not superstitious, and I’m a big supporter of people spending their dough anyway they want. We like these people, they’re good parents, and the guy built a good business, and actually the choice of a three level party boat for the affair was probably very democratically determined by the family. I’m guessing the bill was introduced by his wife and unanimously supported by the three kids, and the only outstanding vote was his. He was the renegade, because I and everyone there knows him to be exceptionally squeamish on boats to the point of illness. Just getting on he looked like the recipient of an eighteenth century drumhead court martial whose sentence was to be “beat ‘round the fleet”, which punishment was just about to begin after he shook hands with the captain and danced the hora. Well, I suppose the role of the man in any large ceremony is to pay for the thing and shut up: He was as green as a Martian.
Well, a couple of stiff restoratives can always take care of bugs in the labonza (or at least that was my thinking), and off we went.
This was in Marina Del Fernando Rey in Los Angeles, just adjacent to the airport, which is either predictable or ironic, or both.
We steamed out of the harbor at a comfortable tenth of a knot an hour, just beating the rotation of the Earth, with a couple of hundred Jews strolling around and eating and waving over the railings, and I remarked that, to all the cars passing on the freeway, they must have looked up at us and thought, “Look, honey, that must be the boat back to Israel. Gee, I didn’t hear about that bill getting passed. Funny how things go. I guess they’re just shipping them all back a few hundred at a time. Well, that’s certainly not going to help sitcoms get any better. Oh, well. At least they seem to have given them a nice party to leave on.” I’m proud to say even the most over-serious, hatchet-faced pedants and PTA leaders thought that was funny.
As my friend Pat Hazell remarked when I told him about us going to the affair, “Well, I hope it’s a great Boat Mitzvah, and the money all goes to the right buoy.” Rule number fourteen in the Big Book of Comedy: There is just nothing in the world that beats a neat pun; nothing.
No, the party was fine, I guess, typical for me and my wife and kids. On the drive over, they all take turns saying, “Dad, stop it, it’s going to be fun. Don’t be so cranky.” And, truth to tell, there was fifteen minutes or so as the thing was pulling out when my wife and I were on top near the bow where the wind and the sun and the air makes you think, “Sure, this is pretty good.” But that was fifteen minutes out of six five hours.
The weirdest part was that you don’t actually go out of the harbor, you just slowly chug down to the breakwater (I know all the terms), turn around, chug back, turn around, back out, turn around, go back. It must have been a dozen or so circuits in the end. At one point I said, “Lord knows I don’t want to help Al Qaeda, but if they need to find a new, large pool to recruit suicide bombers, they should start with all the captains of these party boats. After three or four years of slow circles to nowhere, they must all be thinking, ‘I believe I’m ready to blow the world up.’”
Well, it was a nice party, I guess, and the kid and his family were happy, and the boat company made a few bucks, so I guess the Earth kept turning another day in Southern California.
And my older boy had a great time doing what kids do at that age, push a few boys back and forth while they push you back and forth and then talk to a girl. Very cute, because they all had braces. There was so much metal wire on that kids’ deck they were probably receiving police calls from as far away as Minneapolis.
The irony is that virtually everyone on that boat’s grandparents came to America on ships no larger than that one, but I don’t think they were dancing.
And my wife said, “You know what? Actually, they were.” I nodded and smiled, because she was right. Maybe quietly in corners, maybe just inside their hearts, but wherever your grandparents or great grandparents were from, when they got on those boats in Belfast and London and Marseille and Lisbon and Naples and Frankfurt, they might not have looked alike, and they might not have known the same songs, but they were all surely dancing.
REMEMBER: IF YOU GOT UP AND SPENT YOUR LAST DIME ON TICKETS FOR YOUR FAMILY TO TAKE A BOAT TO AMERICA IN 1903? FOLKS, THE GAME WAS OVER, AND YOUR GRANDCHILDREN WON.
