One Dinner, Priority Mail, Please.

Last year my friend Amanda’s brother John got married at one of those extravagant clubs in New York City where all the woodwork is hand carved from trees that have long since been legally protected from deforestation and the man in the cloakroom quite clearly judges the quality of wool of your winter coat. I didn’t know anyone else attending the affair besides the actual wedding party, so I waited outside in the cold for Amanda’s boyfriend, Stephen, who finally arrived, sprinting across Madison Avenue, hot and bothered and several scotches in, with a skinny, short, cashmere scarf flapping around his neck (a scarf which, to my extreme relief, the aforementioned cloakroom attendant promptly misplaced, never to be seen again).

Before I go any further here’s something else you should know about me: I keep kosher. Not in a crazy, religious zealot type of way, but just in the type of way where I’ve never found myself saying “Please pass the pulled pork!” or “Why yes, I would indeed like fries with that.” The whole kosher business sounds like kind of a drag to the vox populi, but it’s never been a big deal to me, and thank God (literally), the vast majority of alcohol is AOK, so my life has been pretty much the same as everyone else’s when it comes to matters of consumption. 

At John’s wedding I would have been more than satisfied to spend the evening nibbling on martini olives and downing cocktails like a champ, but the girl he married went out of her way to arrange for a kosher meal for me. It was too nice of her, really, but I was happy to know a full dinner would be waiting for me, and that various strangers wouldn’t have to peel my shoeless self off a billiard table later on in the evening after I had drank myself into oblivion on an empty stomach.

When it came time for dinner, I was, of course, seated at the Singles Table with Stephen, Amanda, and a rag tag group of people in their twenties who were all double fisting drinks and seemingly lacking the normal set of social skills. A frazzled and pimpled uniformed server with banana breath immediately approached me and, with a very confused look on his face, asked if I was the “Kosher One.” “That’s me!” I said, hoping to sound and appear normal, and not like I was straight out of the shtetl, trespassing on this WASPy event, hoping for gifilte fish instead of swordfish. “One moment,” he said with a flourish and an indistinguishable accent.

Without getting into the gory and dull details of keeping kosher, one element is that all hot food must be eaten on plates which have only been used for kosher food in the past. At weddings like John’s, where a fantastic kosher meal is provided for me, the food usually arrives from the kitchen on a plate straight from the kosher caterer and is placed in front of me, with no one the wiser as to its origin. Apparently, however, this venue were unfamiliar with the proper protocol, and before my rib roast was delivered, my plate and utensils were given to me, wrapped not in the customary cellophane, but in a yellow, soft, padded, shipping envelope embarrassingly emblazoned with tape that read “ORTHODOX UNION.” (See below.) So much for subtlety. 

Stephen, Amanda, and I absolutely lost it, half drunk and crying with laughter, as I attempted to extricate my cutlery and service wear from the envelope. This wasn’t just any envelope: it was one of those envelopes whose stuffing is that brown, dirty, fluffy kind, that when ripped, explodes everywhere in a dingy puff, like an unfortunate middle school volcano project gone wrong. I spent the next ten minutes ripping the packaging open, spilling the envelope’s innards all over myself and my table mates. Brown linty fibers went literally everywhere, landing in others’ drinks, the centerpiece, my lap, and one piece fizzled out in the flame of a neighboring candle. Finally, the items were freed. I chucked the envelope beneath the table, the filthy, grubby evidence of my struggle surrounding me on all sides. 

Needless to say, the rest of the table was entirely perplexed by my situation. The boy next to me, however, was apparently also a member of the tribe, and seized the opportunity to tell me so. “I’m Jewish, too!” he said in the voice all Jewish dudes use when they find out I am one of Them, too: it’s this voice that says, “No way! Excellent. Before I was going to totally ignore you, but now that I know you know what matzah is, I can bring you home to my mother! Hooray!” It’s pretty amazing how I can go straight to a 9.8 having only provided my last name (a dead giveaway: Goldstein).

“Oh, nice,” I said, unenthused, a red potato in my mouth. I had already been warned about this boy’s imminent presence, and was adequately prepared to primly turn him down. He patted his right nipple and told me, as further proof, “I have a Star of David tattoo.” “Oh, nice,” I said again in my most unimpressed voice, as that is indeed was what I was: unimpressed. “That’s so awesome, man!” some equally graceless, frat boy wannabe interjected and then, thankfully, stole my neighbor away from me.

The rest of the night was fabulous: I gossiped with the groom’s mother in the bathroom, danced with senile old man, befriended many a bartender, and declared the band to be “AMAZING!” a solid several dozen times. But try as I might, I still cannot manage to liberate various remnants of the shipping package from my sparkly dress; I guess it will always be just a little bit obvious that I’m just a little bit more Jewish than everyone else.