Infinite Purim: Purim 5782

Yesterday and today is Purim (פורים, "lots" in the fortune-telling sense) and it's the first one since Purim 2020 that I've attended in person. It was even back at the Davis Theatre again, with the food out in the bar area, just like the first Mishkan Purimspiel I went to. The reader who did voices for the different characters was back!

sashagee couldn't make it. Even if we had found a babysitter, she was too sick to go, which was a bit awkward when the rabbi emailed me on Tuesday and told me how happy she was to see our names on the guest list after everything that has happened in the last few months. She found me at the party pretty early (I'm very easy to spot) and expressed her regrets for everything we had gone through this year so far. Then she gave me a hug.

The spiel was mostly pre-recorded video this year, and the real innovation is that it was a bunch of small skits put together with the aid of the Neo-Futurists, performers of Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind and Chicago's best theatre group according to TimeOut magazine! And also very Jewish, apparently--the reason this happened is that there were at least six or seven Neo-Futurists in the audience at the Purimspiel. My favorite short was the first one they played, a parody of Seasons of Love called "Married to Mishkan" about being the partner of a rabbinical assistant and the "525,600 emails" they have to deal with, but also shoutouts to "My Dad Blows It Again," about the father of the presenter who literally wrote the book on shofarim, "Shofar Sho'Scary" chronicling how the team tasked with recording Mishkan's 2021 Rosh Hashanah services did not bring a tripod (and thus a parody of The Blair Witch Project), and "Mishkan: Reloaded," which was a Matrix parody by the technical director and ended with:

"I am one with the livestream.

"I am the one.

"I am...אחד." (echad, "one")

There was also a lot less innuendo than in most years:

The one problem I had with the event was that they put out the dinner food before the Purimspiel, and the dessert food after...which meant that anyone like me, who's keeping Ta'anit Esther, couldn't eat any dinner food since the fast ended in the middle of the spiel. I grabbed a plate of a few things and brought it into the theatre, so my dinner was asparagus, mushrooms, a bit of salad, and cheese from the cheese plate eaten about halfway through the spiel, and then the hamantaschen from the goodie bags on the empty seats on either side. And then I walked three miles home because I missed the bus. Honestly, the walk was nice--I used to walk miles home alone at night all the time, back before the Plague Years when I had a full schedule and was out doing things all the time--but a full meal would have helped.

I did get flagged down by bunnydelfuego, who recognized me from running into me at last week's Shabbat services, and it turns out she and her partner live nearby! Maybe sashagee and her will get to meet soon like thedukelord suggested.

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For future reference, and if anyone is curious, here's some points from the traditional Jewish understanding of Esther's story that aren't necessarily obvious from a straight reading of the text (Heb: פשט‎ pshat).

( Knowledge Within )