Wednesday, September 1, 2010

I'm not Jewish, but it's okay if you think I am, because I kind of wish I was - Part 2

Now that you're all aware of my great admiration for Jewish culture, let me tell you a little story.  Those who know me are very aware of my propensity to say things just to be outrageous, so keep that in mind if you are easily offended.  Anyway, I sometimes pretend to be a bigot or otherwise repugnant in some way in order to deflect unwanted attention.  I once told a guy in a bar that I was a pre-operative transsexual and was wearing a dress over jeans to hide my bulging package.  (Not that there's anything wrong with being transsexual, but one would generally assume that a guy hitting on a girl in a bar expects said girl to actually be female, and would find anything to the contrary to be a little disturbing.)


Another time, my friends and I were at Sugar Mom's (not a cougar sex party, but rather a bar in the basement of an old sugar factory) in Philly when we were approached by two very short, unattractive, 30-ish looking guys.  I'm pretty sure the less aggressive of the two guys was gay, because he was friendly, interesting, not aggressive, and simply delightful.  I wanted to put him in my pocket and take him home with me.  The straight guy, however, was a pompous ass.  He was getting on everyone's nerves, and would not leave me alone.

I decided to pull out a joke that I knew would not be well-received by someone with no sense of humor.  I prefaced the story by explaining that I was Jewish, so what I was about to say was totally okay.  The pompous ass's eyes lit up as he explained that he, too, was Jewish.  Oh boy, I thought.  This is going to be extra offensive, because this guy is Jewish yet he appears to have no sense of humor whatsoever.  He will stalk off angrily and we will be free of his unwanted company.


"So, I have this dream of opening up an animal shelter just for cats.  I feel like there are too many stray cats around, and it's just so sad to see them roaming the streets, starving, getting rained on and run over by cars.  It's just heartbreaking, I feel so bad for the little babies.  But there are also a lot of really ugly, mangy ones, and probably even some retarded ones.  So at this shelter, I'm going to euthanize all the undesirable cats.  I'm thinking of naming it Meowschwitz."

 
The look on his face when I finished my story...was actually really disappointing.  Instead of deciding I was weird, or a bigot, or otherwise not worth his time, and going away as I'd hoped, he took the opportunity to launch into a diatribe about how his grandparents were Holocaust survivors and I should be ashamed of myself, blah blah blah.  To get him to shut up, I told him that in my family, we deal with grief and horror through laughter.  Given his absence of humor, he clearly couldn't understand this.  He continued his diatribe until we decided to leave early just to get away from him.

I thought the incident was behind me when, the following weekend, in a Seinfeldian twist, I went to the Philadelphia Museum of Art on Free Sunday with Andy and two of his friends.  We were just exiting a stairwell and heading for an exhibit when I spotted my humorless acquaintance and his delightful friend perusing that very same exhibit.  "I can't be here right now," I blurted, and raced back up the stairs.  At the time, it seemed like a close call, but looking back, I guess I shouldn't have been surprised to see him there on Free Sunday...

5 comments:

  1. i'm owning your comments right now (and won't go back to see if you responded to all of them, MY BAD)

    but

    during this whole event, as they were talking to you, one of them said to me and keith that "you guys should not be letting this happen right now, we're in your turf" - if i was drunker and 4 inches taller i would have decked the kid right then

    ReplyDelete
  2. Oh yea, I forgot about that part. I knew there was another reason why that guy was a ginormous douche.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I would like at least a half hour heads up to any situation where Dave is going to be in a fight and Keith would be his backup. At the very least, I'd expect some cell phone video coverage.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Cooke I feel like at least once in my relatively-young adult years I need to be in a situation where I got someone's back or they got mine. I almost had this chance in Daytona last summer but by getting my back, my friends took that to mean "grab me before i punched the dude who just shoved my other friend and forecfully remove me from the club". Come to think of it, I also now re-remembered Adam saving me from years in prison by tackling me before I literally shoved a guy off of a 25 foot vertical drop onto concrete, after he took a swing at me, missed, and hung perilously from a fench with 2 toes being the only thing keeping him from going over (and the lack of me pushing him in the chest because i was laying on the ground with a kid on top of me now)

    ReplyDelete
  5. Dave I think that time at Sugar Mom's was your moment. You had a good couple inches on those guys. You and Keith totally could have taken them. And then Evan could have posted the cell phone video on YouTube, it would have gone viral, and we'd all be rich right now. Way to not step up.

    ReplyDelete