Brats and Angels
What made the difference?
My college buddies and I laughed and laughed at “Baby Got Back.” Sir Mix-a-Lot’s raunchy novelty hit praising full-figured females topped the Billboard chart during our sophomore year. Nearly a decade later, I was not in the least bit amused to hear it at a bat mitzvah reception.
Candle-type chandeliers hung above a dozen or so tables in the ballroom, a short drive from the suburban, East Coast, Reform synagogue where the ceremony was held that morning. I poked at the rubber-chicken lunch while chatting with another late-twenty-something about my job, the apartment I’d rented with my soon-to-be fiancée, and other grown-up stuff. From the corner of my eye I observed misbehavior on the dance floor.
A pubescent boy wearing an oxford shirt, tie and khakis, probably one of the bat mitzvah girl’s classmates, took a cassette from his pocket and asked the DJ to play it. The fool obliged.
I recognized a rudimentary bass line, reminiscent of a prerecorded backing track on a cheap 1980s Casio keyboard. Dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun.
Now a bunch of kids, most but not all of them boys, were jumping around and shouting along to a song I hadn’t thought of in years.
I like BIG BUTTS and I cannot lie.
The little shits knew all the words.
Your girlfriend rolls a Honda, plays workout tapes by Fonda, but Jane Fonda ain’t got no motor in the back of her Honda. The adults, innocent of X-rated hip-hop lyrics, widened their eyes in bewilderment.
These shenanigans might have bothered me less were it not for what happened next.
Vulgarity aside, there was something endearing in Sir Mix-a-Lot’s message. So Cosmo says you’re fat? Well, I ain’t down with that. In an era when anorexic beauty standards prevailed in mass media, he may have stopped insecure teens from inducing vomit after meals.
This message was lost on the bat mitzvah brats.
After the dance-floor ruckus ended, a thin, pretty girl walked up to a heavyset girl and said something like, “I hope you don’t think we were making fun of you.”
Translation: “We were playing that song deliberately to make fun of you.”
I’d forgotten any Hebrew since my bar mitzvah some 15 years earlier. But when you grow up attending New York City prep schools, you can never forget the language of cruel tween JAPs.
A couple years later, newly married, my wife and I attended a bar mitzvah in Monsey, New York. There was no rap music at this reception. There was no secular music.
When we arrived, the bar mitzvah boy’s father handed me a yarmulke from his pocket.
“I figured, ‘Marc must think there’s a basket of them when you walk in,’” he said.
He was right! I did assume there would be a basket. There was none. In Monsey, the men wear their skullcaps – more often, their wide-brimmed black hats – all the time.
The men sat separately from the women. Only the men danced. I wondered how all those Jewish ladies had straight blonde hair; later my wife explained that, duh, Orthodox women wear wigs. At her table a woman who looked barely 18 sported a rock on her finger five times larger than my 28-year-old bride’s engagement ring. I struggled to make conversation with the men at my table. We had little in common but genes.
But the children.
I had never seen such well-behaved children in my life. The boys sat side-by-side at one long table, facing the podium. (The girls must have been with their mothers.) As the guest of honor concluded his speech, these cherubim with sidelocks burst into song congratulating their friend. Siman tov umazal tov, umazal tov vesiman tov. “Good sign and good luck, good luck and good sign.”
Later, comparing the two events, I wondered if the discipline of strict religious observance, something I’d long scoffed at, explained the Monsey children’s kinder manners. I joked that when I had kids, I would LARP as Orthodox for a time. When my firstborn turned 18, I’d say, “Shmuel, I haven’t been straight with you all these years. I’m actually on the fence about this whole ‘God’ thing. Let me shave my beard and we’ll discuss over a bacon cheeseburger.”
The joke was on me. It wasn’t the observance, but the belief behind it that made the difference. If you know God is watching, you’ll act accordingly. Covering the head is surely the least of it.
"Baby Got Back" makes me laugh. All that defensive rage over his preference for certain secondary sexual characteristics...the 90s was a wacky time indeed.