Talking in Shul, Playing Ball, Dino Sex

Gilda forwarded an article to me from, appropriately enough, The Forward, a newspaper that during its heyday at the turn of the 20th century as a Yiddish newspaper serving the mostly Eastern European influx of Jewish immigrants, dealt not only with news of the day but also with setting social mores for the “greenhorn” population (The Forward now is available on-line, in English). The article that caught her attention chronicled the efforts of Orthodox rabbis to control incessant talking in the pews during services (http://forward.com/articles/183217/rabbis-declare-war-on-chit-chat-in-synagogue/?p=all). Though a minor nuisance in Conservative and Reform temples, kibitzing, gossiping, chit-chatting is a constant background drum in Orthodox synagogues. 

I grew up in an Orthodox shul, currently am a member of a Conservative temple and have attended services in Reform and Reconstructionist houses of worship. I, thus, have reason to believe my theory of congregant conversation has legitimacy. It’s simply a matter of whom you sit next to.

In Conservative, Reform and Reconstructionist temples husbands and wives sit together. Unless they’re not on speaking terms, they’ve had ample opportunity to exchange thoughts in the privacy of their home, or in the car, or maybe over dinner in a restaurant. Sure there would be something fresh to talk about at temple, say, how the bar-mitzvah boy’s mother was dressed appropriately, or not, but by and large there’s not much new to say.

On the other hand, Orthodox synagogues segregate men from women. Husband and wife are seated next to people, usually friends, they might not see during the week. There’s lots to discuss: business, sports, politics, children, TV, movies, the list goes on and on. It’s simply a matter of being social trumping absolute devotion to prayer. Those Orthodox rabbis can pray for divine help all they want, but it will be to no avail. 

What do baseball fans want? Championships, of course. But realistically, they want to see their team play meaningful games in September. Against the odds, the injury plagued, elderly NY Yankees are  playing such games. Even the devastating losses to the Boston Red Sox this weekend could not alter the fact that the games were meaningful.

I can say the same thing about our temple softball team. Last Sunday, September 1, we had to win to make the playoffs. We did, 7-6, behind a rousing five-run ninth inning rally we almost squandered by giving up three runs in the bottom half of the ninth. Today we played another meaningful September game. We lost by a score too embarrassing to publish, but we had fun, and that’s what really counted.

Sexual Fantasies: I’ll end today with an off-beat item too amusing to pass up passing along. Ever wonder how dinosaurs procreated? Can’t say I ever did, but this link to a story from Radiolab from NPR will provide some fanciful notions on how they got it on, or  should that be “in”? http://www.radiolab.org/blogs/radiolab-blogland/2013/aug/06/subtle-mysteries-dinosaur-sex/ 

Sleep, Perchance to Dream

How did you sleep last night? 

If a recent survey of 3,700 people is to be believed, some 10% of you slept as I did, on your back. Almost three-quarters of you (74%) slept on your side. The rest (16%) lay on your tummy. When I was younger I used to sleep on my stomach. Then I gravitated to my side. Recently, I find myself on my back most nights. 

What stimulated this nocturnal revelation is the commemoration of National Sleep Day on Thursday, which prompted a release from Anna’s Linens on a survey of sleeping habits. Anna’s Linens has more than 300 stores spread throughout the country. 

I’m a three-pillow sleeper, a holdover from my nights sleeping on my side. One pillow would be for under my head, another I would cradle around my torso and the third would get tucked between my knees so bone wouldn’t knock against bone. Laugh if you will, but when Gilda attended nursing school and learned the proper way to make a patient comfortable, the instructor described my regimen to a tee. She started giggling in class when she heard this. She confessed to classmates she had always made fun of my sleeping arrangement. Ah, vindication. How sweet.

I might have been able to milk this sentiment had I not been guilty of excessive snoring. Gilda is among the 47% of those who share a bed with someone who snores. Many a night she nudges me to stop sawing wood so she can have a restful sleep.

For a variety of reasons, two-thirds of those surveyed said they enjoy restful sleeps just three nights or less per week. Sunday nights provide the least restful slumber, followed by Mondays. Friday and Saturday nights are the most restful. 

This survey did not reveal how often people have sex, but it did find 8% sleep naked. Another 74% said they wear pajamas in bed, leaving the attire of 18% unaccounted for.

Gilda would tell you I’m forever recounting to her my dreams. Often, after waking up in the middle of the night, I am able to resume a dream when sleep returns. The survey found more than half the respondents said they're able to recall less than one-quarter of their dreams, while approximately 10% said they were able to recall nearly all their dreams from that night's sleep.

Hopefully, this information will not keep you up tonight. 

Marvin Traub, Beach Bums, Sex, Norman Sas and Obama

Hail and Farewell to the Prince: I met the indefatigable Marvin Traub several times, while he was head of Bloomingdale’s and during the last 20 years when he was thought to be too old to run the trendsetting Upper East Side emporium and started his own international consulting company. He was a paragon of the “retailing is theater” school, perhaps its greatest practitioner, a merchant prince who captivated a generation of shoppers and thereby transformed a sleepy, discount-oriented department store propped between Lexington and Third Avenues in Manhattan into an essential stop by every New York visitor including royalty, show biz luminaries, and everyday gawkers from around the United States and the world.

Traub died Wednesday. He was 87. The obituary in The NY Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/12/business/marvin-s-traub-who-made-bloomingdales-a-home-of-style-dies-at-87.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all) did not come close to revealing the magnetic personality and command Traub had on retailing and pop culture, especially on New York City. When the city teetered on the brink of bankruptcy in the mid 1970s, when the city dangled perilously close to lawlessness in the 1980s, Bloomingdale’s shone as a beacon of cache and refinement. There were many New Yorkers, including one of my staff writers, who made Bloomie’s a daily must-visit. 

There are comparatively few retail geniuses at work today, men and women with ideas and visions that transformed the buying and selling of goods. Eugene Ferkauf, who founded E.J. Korvettes and modern discounting, died a few weeks ago. Traub was among that pantheon of leaders. 

Passing The Times: Our daughter Ellie and her husband-to-be Donny are trendsetters. At least as far as knowing which beach to sun and surf at. They discovered Fort Tilden beach in Queens a good four years before The Times named it “one of New York’s great hidden beaches” a few weeks ago. Kinda disappointing The Times didn’t include them in any of the 14 photos that accompanied the article, though I might have been a little taken aback if Ellie showed up as one of those beachgoers who “go topless.”

You never know where or when your past will intrude on your present. Reading through the Letters to the Editor of last Saturday’s Times I came upon a short note from Ira Sohn reacting to an opinion piece from Bill Keller advocating a national ID card. I’ll pass on the desirability of such a card. I was more interested in Ira Sohn. If he’s the Ira Sohn I think he is, we attended high school together in Brooklyn, Yeshivah of Flatbush, graduating in 1966. Our senior class secretary, Ira Sohn is a professor in the economics and finance department of Montclair State University. 

Sleepy Head: Whenever I would yawn in front of my mother she’d call me “sleepy head” and suggest, “You’d be less tired if you didn’t fool around at night, but then you wouldn’t have as much fun.” 

She must have been onto something, if a survey published in the NY Daily News is a true indicator of national behavior. Seems an online study of 1,000 people commissioned by Trojans, the condom maker, has found New Yorkers have five times as much sex as the average in 10 major cities across the nation (http://www.nydailynews.com/whoopee-city-tops-sex-survey-article-1.1113403). 

For what it’s worth, while I could believe there’s more action in the Big Apple, I don’t believe the rest of the country lags so far behind. 

Speaking of Action and having fun, one of the best games of my 1950s-early 1960s childhood was electric football, a precursor to today’s video game versions of mayhem on the gridiron. The inventor of electric football, Norman Sas, died last month. He, too, was 87. Younger readers might not know about electric football, but those of us of a certain age remember it fondly and with some degree of exasperation when your felt-bottomed players failed to go in the direction you wanted them to. Here’s the obit on Norman Sas: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/13/business/norman-sas-inventor-of-electric-football-dies-at-87.html

Communicator-in-Chief: Teasers for a Charlie Rose interview of Barack and Michelle Obama airing Sunday night on 60 Minutes have the president saying, "The mistake of my first term—couple of years—was thinking that this job was just about getting the policy right. And that's important. But the nature of this office is also to tell a story to the American people that gives them a sense of unity and purpose and optimism, especially during tough times."

Wrong. We did not need another Reagan in the White House. We needed another LBJ, someone who could whip recalcitrant Democrats into line and even pull some Republicans into the fold to pass legislation this country needed. Instead, we got a hands-off chief executive who naively believed Republicans were joking when they said their main task during his presidency would be to make sure it lasted just four years. He naively believed they would put country first, would work with him. So he wound up squandering Democratic majorities in the House and Senate during his first two years in office. 

He’s too laid back for the fight he is in. He needs to be more Harry S. Truman, less Jimmy Carter. He needs to show he wants to be our leader. Tell us stories if you want to Mr. President, but don’t forget to tell us what you will do in the next four years and ram home what benefits and programs Mitt Romney would remove if he gets to sit behind that desk in the Oval Office. 

  

Sugar Daddies, Trust in God, The Summer Camp Experience

Sugar Daddies: Or perhaps I should have titled this segment Sugar Babies. Either way, we’re dealing with the same phenomenon, albeit in different cultures.

Seems young women in America and China are turning to the oldest profession in the world after finding careers in modern walks of life not forthcoming. Recent articles portray college coeds and graduates as independent contractors plying the sex trade for profit.

In the case of U.S. practitioners (let’s not call them prostitutes for now), the thrust of this new-found interest is to find someone(s) to pay off their mounting college tuition bills (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/07/29/seeking-arrangement-college-students_n_913373.html).

In China, a land of increasingly stiff competition to supplant the U.S. as the world’s dominant economic power, young nubile women are status symbols sought by the wealthy and powerful, not all of whom are eligible bachelors. Indeed, having a mistress is the modern day version of keeping a concubine (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/10/world/asia/10mistress.html?ref=world).

It’s hard not to smile when reading these stories, though I must admit they portray rather discouraging states of the mores and fiscal conditions of the two largest economies in the world.


In God We Trust? Not so fast. Though our paper money extols trust in the Almighty, a survey by Public Policy Polling of North Carolina, a Democratic-leaning firm, found barely half of all Americans believe God is doing a good job.

As reported on Wednesday’s The Colbert Report, in response to the question, “If God exists, do you approve or disapprove of God’s performance,” just 52% of the 928 Americans polled in mid July answered in the affirmative. Nine percent disapproved, while 40% were “not sure” (those numbers add up to 101%, but don’t worry—some angel must have been sitting on the head of a poll taker’s pen causing the lapse in math).

Hard to say why God was having almost as much trouble as President Obama, whose approval ratings in another recent PPP survey hit just 46%. But Stephen Colbert had as logical a reason as any for God’s less than inspiring numbers: “The public is always tough on a prominent figure who had a child out of wedlock.”


Jewish Indians? I am familiar with Iroquois Indians. I am familiar with Camp Ramah, a chain of Jewish overnight and day camps throughout the United States, Canada and Israel. But I was caught off guard by a mini-bus scurrying around Yonkers the other day sporting the Camp Ramaquois name tag. Had I run across proof the 10 lost tribes of Israel had evolved into Native Americans? (That gag is one of the funnier bits of dialogue in the now classic western Cat Ballou.) Was Camp Ramaquois melding Jewish and Native American heritages?

Anyway, I googled Camp Ramaquois and found it to be a day camp in Pomona, NY. From everything I saw on the Web site, it appears to be a wonderful place to spend a summer. But it surely was not the type of summer camping experience I had. Nor did it reflect positively, in my mind, on the toughness of our youth to endure a summer in the great outdoors.

Now, Gilda would tell you the sleepaway camps I attended for 15 years were cushy. After all, their bunks had indoor plumbing and we barely ever hiked or camped out in the woods. She’d go positively bonkers if she knew the conveniences today’s campers enjoy at Ramaquois, as described by its Web site (italics added for emphasis):

* Over 50 fixed buildings, including air-conditioned facilities such as the gymnasium, movie theater, work shops, craft areas, computer lab and dining room;
* Spring-fed, natural five acre lake encompassing 2 "bongo" water trampolines, bumper boats, water bikes, paddle boards, inner tubes, "water-duckies", fountain sprays, kayaks and a professional team of lifeguards;
* 9 softball fields, 6 tennis courts, 3 basketball courts, 2 hockey rinks, 1 indoor and 3 grass volleyball courts, 3 soccer fields, 2 wiffle ball courts, 2 Bonzo Ball walls, 2 Ga-Ga courts and 6 pickle ball courts;
* 8 pools, all with a water temperature of 84 degrees;
* Air-conditioned health center with five registered nurses and an EMT;
* Separate Junior Camp facilities including air-conditioned bunks, climbing wall and challenge course and hockey rink:
* A state-of-the-art archery range;
* Athletics Pavilion and gymnastics equipment including pommel horses, uneven bars and a tumble track;
* Vertical reality climbing tower and element park;
* Zip line over Rama Lake;
* Nature science center, including a petting zoo and fishing dock;
* Water Works spray park.

I don’t know about you, but I totally want to go there! A/C in the bunks and dining room! 84 degrees in the pool! Sign me up. I might even learn to swim there!

Sex in the City

Did you have sex last night?

According to a new Web-based survey of 1,000–plus Americans 18 and older, sponsored by adults products purveyor Adam & Eve, if you did you were among the 14% who choose Wednesday as their preferred day of the week for intimate relations. Wednesday is the most preferred mid-week day for sex, followed by 13% for Mondays and Thursdays and 12% for Tuesdays.

Not surprisingly, weekends are most often chosen for lovemaking, with 30% of respondents preferring Saturday, 22% opting for Friday and 20% Sunday.

To quote the company’s press release, “Interestingly, a whopping 65% of all respondents said they have no preference when it comes to which day they choose to have sex.” I’m guessing most of those 65% were men.

Speaking of sex, it’s hard to imagine anything but a delayed resignation coming from Congressman Anthony Weiner. I can’t imagine anyone in the Democratic party leadership praying for anything but a quick resolution to this sordid and spectacular fall from grace for a politician nobody really liked but many admired for his tenacity, in-your-face-attitude, and inexhaustible energy.

Gilda brought home an article in amNew York Tuesday that sought to explain “what made promising pol act this way?” The newspaper carried opinions from a psychology professor and psychiatrist.

But do we really need a mental health professional to explain why he did it? After all the politicians and sports figures, celebrities and, recently, bankers who have misbehaved, can’t we comprehend these high testosterone players feel they are above the fray, above the law, that even if they’re caught they can get away with it because they think they are special and generally can afford the high-priced lawyers who can safeguard their freedom? It seems no amount of prior revelations of their peers can deter these self-destructive men from behaving badly.

Staying with sex as today’s theme, a few weeks ago the NY Times ran an article on the Museum of Sex in Manhattan (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/15/nyregion/new-blue-laws-for-new-york-inspired-by-the-museum-of-sex.html?scp=1&sq=museum%20of%20sex&st=cse). Located on Fifth Avenue at 27th Street, the museum has been open nine years. About two years ago, after attending a Sunday theatre matinee, I visited the Museum of Sex with Gilda and two friends, a married couple who shall remain anonymous in case their grown children see this blog.

Just to be clear about this, it was Gilda’s idea, not mine. Truth be told, it was a fascinating experience. Yes, you could wind up smirking at some of the bawdy merchandise for sale, but the actual museum displays, with their elaborate histories of our nation’s repressed sexual mores, were quite illuminating.

Just in case you didn’t read the article on the museum, it ended with a reference to “Adam and Eve Disappearing Fig Leaf Mugs.” Use your imagination to figure that one out.



(Editor’s note: From time to time—which means when I remember—I will include the following disclaimer: The opinions expressed are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of my dear wife, Gilda.)