So! Sunday Night I went to Chicago Meg's house on the river for my first seder. Capital S on that? I dunno. It was so nutty! I had no idea. I mean! If I had known about this religion that MAKES you drink wine - FOUR TIMES! - I would have signed up for that ages ago. Chicago Meg said we were supposed to throw it back, too, so you really do get woozy pretty quickly. A lot of it was fuzzy to me - some familiar stuff (Miriam, river, reeds, blah blah, wandering, Red Sea) and some not so familiar (like why the "mortar" tasted like fruit; I mean if it's meant to be a symbol of enslavery, it seems to me it should taste bad, not magically delicious!) But whatever, no one asked me my opinion of the plot.
Chicago Meg set a lovely table and I was pleased to discover that there were lots of props. I liked the ten-plague-finger-puppets the best. These were actually a re-gift, originally given to me by my Lady Author friend Katharine Weber, but I passed them on to Chicago Meg because I didn't have any History of the Hebrews puppet shows planned in my immediate future. At the time. But now I might want them back! There were also finger puppets for the Four Questions, about which I will say: these are not the Four Questions I would have asked. But anyway, these four seem popular.
Chicago Meg lives on the river and her dining room overlooks the Grand Ole Opry complex. And you know what that means! Right on cue during the Red Sea part of the story...here comes the General Jackson Showboat, chugging upriver, overloaded with buffet-grazing tourists and blaring "Sweet Home Alabama." Okay, no, not really, it was a different song. One we could not identify, but we all decided the story would be better if it was "Sweet Home Alabama," which actually does get played on the General Jackson steamboat every night, so we aren't changing the story too much. We toyed with "What a Friend We Have in Jesus," but thought, no, that is too much for anyone to believe. We (okay: I) interrupted the story to all run out and take pictures of it. Okay, so then there was brisket and matzoh ball soup and green beans and our friend Lauren brought a pavlova that was pretty damned great and there was wine wine wine, oh there was wine. Seems like there was one part where we had to go on a treasure hunt for a cracker. They made the non-Jews do it since there weren't enough kids (there was just one) to do it. The cracker was hidden in a grandfather clock. Sister Meg found it. Then we opened up the books again and finished the plot of Passover. I give the story an 8.
Then, just like Moses did after he parted the Red Sea and freed the slaves by writing the Emancipation Proclamation and inventing electricity (again: wine), we picked out paint colors for Chicago Meg's bedroom. Jamaican Aqua, which isn't at all the color you think it is. We also discovered that accent walls - where you paint one wall a different color - are OUT! Don't even THINK of it! PASS ME THE SMELLING SALTS! After all that finger puppetry and crazy made-up-sounding singing, it was nice to learn something at last!
