Jerusalem Syndrome - Marc Maron [48]
“I can’t do comedy at a podium. What’s the screen for?” I asked, panicking.
“Oh, didn’t I tell you? We’re having a fundraising dinner before the show for Marilyn Rienman in honor of her service in the community. We thought you would emcee it. You could pep it up. They’re usually so boring. Did you have Marilyn as a teacher?”
“Yeah, third grade, I think. She was one of the only Hebrew school teachers I liked.”
“See? This is going to be so wonderful,” she said, surveying the room. “Isn’t it beautiful?”
“I wish you would have told me about the dinner. I should prepare some stuff.”
“You’ll be fine,” she said with mommy confidence.
“So, the show will be in here after the dinner?” I said, trying to figure out the logistics.
“No,” she said frankly. “After dinner everyone will move up to the sanctuary for the comedy show.”
“You want me to do comedy in the sanctuary?” I was freaking out a bit. “Is that okay? It seems like that would be wrong somehow. I’m not sure I’m comfortable with that.”
“Look, you’ll get comfortable. There are no other options. It’ll have to be fine.” She said this in that tone that suggested that there would be no other way to be other than fine.
“Do I have to wear a yarmulke?” I blurted.
“I don’t know. I’ll have to check with Mr. Ross.”
“Mr. Ross is still here? Wow, yeah, you better check.”
Mr. Ross was the brooding, bearded moral custodian of the synagogue. I’m not really sure what his job was, but he was always around when I was a kid. He acted as the bad cop to the rabbi’s good cop. He was an authoritarian and a strict disciplinarian when it came to troublemakers, and the thought of him used to scare me.
“Marc, there are going to be two hundred people at the dinner and three hundred at the show. This is the biggest event of this kind we have ever had here. It’s all because of you,” Rosalie said, layering the guilt on top of the expectation beautifully; she was a real pro. “Just don’t be filthy, sweetie,” she said, and walked away to deal with the caterers.
I was momentarily terrified. I would be doing comedy on the same bema that I was bar mitzvahed on. I would do my jokes on the altar in front of the arc that contained the Torahs that I read from as a boy. It was too weird. It was almost as if I was getting a second chance to do it right. There was a moment when I thought I should actually read my haftorah. I had the same fear I had felt before my bar mitzvah, for roughly the same reasons.
I walked out of the social hall and up into the sanctuary alone. It wasn’t much different than I remembered it. There was another panel of Yahrzeit plaques in the entrance, but aside from that it was pretty much the same. It was a large semicircular room with red carpet. About four hundred seats fanned out in sections around a semicircular bema that was elevated by two steps. There was a podium in the middle of the bema and a large arc behind the podium with chairs on each side. The roof was pitched, like the underside of a giant umbrella. In the center of the roof was a large circular skylight with a cylindrical lip cut at an angle that protruded into the room. It looked like the end of a giant organ pipe. A tube that light passed through. When I was a kid I thought that God listened through that hole.
I walked up the stairs and stood on the bema. The spiritual importance of the place had been hammered into my brain, so it felt holy. I vaguely remembered being up there and looking down at my Grandma Goldy smiling in the front row. My voice cracking through an overstudied adolescent rendition of the service. I stood alone in the quiet only a sanctuary can offer and I looked up, took a deep breath, and said, “God,