My Inner Maccabee

The best Chanukah gift I ever got was when I was twenty-two years old: I was sprung from prison.

I was on tour to promote my first album - Jewish folk music that was going to catapult me to the top of the pop charts. I was the girl singer, a last minute replacement for the original singer, who, as I see it now, got out just in the nick of time.

Our trio, Serenade, sang in synagogues and Jewish Community Centers, places where the audiences were thrilled to see anyone under the age of ninety singing Jewish music, and they showered us with appreciation and, occasionally, payment of cheek pinches and cinnamon rugelech.

One evening, as we were finishing up a rehearsal, Rick, the violin player called me over.

“Don’t say no right off the bat. Just hear me out.” He said.

 Ron, the guitar player, gave me a big smile and a thumbs up.

“We have a gig next week.” Rick said slowly. “It’s at a prison – but wait! I spoke to the chaplain, and he assured me that this is one of those places that’s like a summer camp for businessmen.”

He looked into my eyes.

"Just say yes."

Many of my life stories with bad outcomes begin with the word, "yes". This is one of them.

Monday morning, the first day of Chanukah, Rick and Ron came to my house to pick me up for the concert. They were dressed in their finest gig outfits: matching blue and silver vests and berets. Ron added a pair of suspenders to complete his ensemble. I was wearing huge cloisonné dreidl earrings and a silver sash around my hips. We looked about as sharp as a trio of weenie Jewish folksingers in 1976 ever did. Even I would want to beat us up if I saw us today.

I climbed into the back of Ron’s ’64 VW Bug and settled into the folding lawn chair that served as a back seat. Ron handed me a cowbell on a rope.“Here. You’re horn monitor.” 

I was a little bit nervous but I am always a little bit nervous. I am a hand wringer by nature, living on bravado and Pepto Bismol.

Three hours later, we came to a sign that read “State Prison. Lock Your Doors.”   Then, another sign: “Do Not Stop For Hitchhikers.” That seemed a tad harsh for a businessman's summer camp . I held tightly to the cowbell horn, ready to ring it in an emergency.

A guard stopped our car, and motioned for us to roll down the window. This took the collective effort of all four of us, as the car had no interior handles.

Surely we were at the wrong place. The prison we were looking for had chaise lounges and picnic tables and, in my fantasies, a couple of William Morris agents who would offer us a record deal right on the spot.

We came to another barbed- wired gate. It was surrounded by uniformed, gun-toting guards. One of them took one look at Rick’s carrot-orange frizzy hair, Ron’s rainbow suspenders and my terrified face, and nearly cracked a smile.

I reached in my pocket and fondled my last two Pepto Bismol tablets nervously as a man in a blue work shirt and jeans, the scariest man I had ever seen in my life, took a step towards me. The guards did nothing about it. Help, Oh sweet Jesus, what was this?

Ron said, “Hi.”

Scary Guy laughed as hard as a guy with two lit cigarettes in his mouth could laugh.

We were led to a small, glassed-in room. A guard pointed to the sign above him and read it out loud to us. Do not move unless instructed to do so.

No one instructed us to move so we just stood there, sweating, for, like, three hours. Finally, an electric door opened and an alarmingly happy man in a blue suit approached us.

We were led to the prison gymnasium, where the concert was to be held. A makeshift stage, consisting of three large platforms and a white sheet for a curtain, had been set up for us. A ring of armed guards standing shoulder to shoulder circled our stage. I was starting to hyperventilate.

We were introduced to an extremely intense looking man named Teejay, a prisoner who had been assigned to help us backstage.

“What are you going to sing?” Teejay asked me.

“Uh, some Hanukah songs” I said. I felt it was best to leave out the hard “ch” on Chanukah. Keep a low profile.

The gym door suddenly buzzed open, and endless rows of blue work -shirted prisoners filed in. I was supposed to open with “Dreidle, Dreidle” to this crowd?

I prayed for a miracle, anything that would save me from having to do this. Please, please, please.

Rick picked up his violin and nodded to Ron. 

They began the introduction to “Dreidl, Dreidl”.

The booing and hissing started before I even started singing. We were going to die there, I just knew it. Ron played my entrance cue on the guitar.

I couldn't move.

Rick shot me a look of desperation. His facial tics were out of control, like he had stuck his wet finger into an electrical socket. I couldn’t keep him there playing that same violin line forever. I walked to the front of the stage and took the microphone in my hand. The prisoners grew quiet for a moment. I heard guitar and violins playing somewhere above my head, as if the angels were calling to me. Run away, they called, run like the fucking wind.

I put my hand on the microphone stand to steady myself, but I knocked the microphone to the floor. I bent down to pick it up and instantly, wild clapping and hooting filled the gym. As I stood up I heard a low chant rising up from the bleachers.

I started singing about the lovely dreidl with legs so short and thin. The chanting was getting louder.

I looked around the gym and I thought about all the protests I had been to in my life, all the petitions I had signed to tear down prisons. I had imagined myself quite the activist, having stood outside the courthouse one warm summer Santa Cruz evening holding my hand-lettered sign that read build people not prisons. I had brought my guitar that evening and led the twenty or so people there in chorus after chorus of “I Shall Be Released” and everyone had cheered. Why weren’t these men cheering?

I changed my mind about prisons right then and there. Build more! Build them bigger! Lock them up! Fuck.

I stopped singing. What was that chant? I turned to Ron.

“Bend over.” He mouthed the words to me.

What?

“They’re saying ‘bend over”, he repeated. "They've been saying it ever since you picked up your mic. "

Suddenly, an alarm went off and the doors buzzed open. A voice came over the loudspeaker. “Concert’s over. Units A and B proceed to roll call.” The prisoners filed out of the gym as quickly as they had come in. They chanted, “bend over”, as they passed in front of me - very softly, very creepy.

The concert, which was supposed to have lasted one hour, had lasted only eight minutes.

It was a Chanukah miracle.

We stood on the stage and watched the enormous room empty out. “What just happened?” I asked Teejay.

“Nothing. The usual. We don’t go for this shit much. Except they liked it when you bent down.”

Clouds filled the sky and rain pounded on Ron’s little VW Beetle as we drove home that night. The car had no windshield wipers so we had to roll the windows down and hand-wipe the windshield every few minutes. I sat in the back, holding on to my lawn chair, bundled up in my down jacket. I was freezing and exhausted. But I was victorious. I had stood on that stage and faced my fear, faced death; as sure as Judah Maccabee had faced the army of Antiochus Epiphanes.

I turned to the open window, letting the rain soak my sweaty face, and threw my last two Pepto Bismol tablets out into the dark night.