Culture (of a sort) comes to Beit Shemesh
There isn’t much nightlife in Beit Shemesh most of the time, aside from shiurim (if you consider that nightlife). So I jumped at the opportunity to catch our local performance of the Comedy for Koby tour, which holds shows in all of the major Anglo population centers in Israel. To tell the truth, I might’ve preferred to see the show in one of the other venues, so as not to feel like I was attending a shul function, but in the end, having a show within Beit Shemesh is just to convenient to pass up.
The show was solid. Despite obvious punch-pulling, the comics all got a solid flow going. Amy and I were careful not to sit in the “splash zone” – the first row and the front sides of the audience are the most likely to get picked on – as opposed to a certain member of the Beit Shemesh Board Game Club, who was probably looking for attention on a birthday outing.
The show was held on the evening following Obama’s Cairo address (which I’ll need to address in another post), and the first comic, David Crowe, was clearly caught off guard when he started to go into his “Obama routine” and was met with boos and hisses.
Finally, the last performer, Jeffrey Ross, asked for a volunteer from the audience to play a few mood-setting chords on the piano for his “Love Poems”. Amy grabbed my arm and said, “Don’t — you — dare!”, but she needn’t have worried. The cry went up: “Lenny! Lenny!” Lenny Solomon (of Shlock Rock fame) was at the show and bounded up to the stage. Jeffrey Ross looked at Lenny and the crowd’s unexpected reaction, and asked: “Are you famous or something?” Celebrity is a relative thing.