Case in point: My wife, Kelly, a musical theatre singer and actor, who works tirelessly, auditioning and performing, and whose calling is fulfilled before an audience, has found her largest audience ever - an audience of hundreds of thousands - totally inadvertently.No, I'm not referring to her year on tour with "Les Miserables," nor to her present role in the regional premiere (Salt Lake City) of the same musical (see previous posting).
I'm referring to Kelly's surreal cameo in a hokey viral video called "Manischewitzville." This video slideshow began circulating the Internet in the weeks before Passover of 2007 and continues to enter my Inbox from various colleagues and congregants, occasionally prefaced by, "Hey! Was that Kelly in there? I'm pretty sure that was Kelly!"
Indeed it is. Kelly appears at 3:07 into the overlong video, which is a photo montage o
f Seder-related miscellany set to a badly performed parody of Jimmy Buffett's "Margaritaville." The photo in question is a picture of our family Seder from 2005 - held at the University Club in Providence, Rhode Island. I deduced that the picture was nabbed from the public domain archives on Flickr.com where I had uploaded a bunch of photos a long time ago - before switching over to Google's online photo utility, Picasa Web Albums.The video is this year's answer to last year's cleverer animated rap video, "Matzah" (featuring Smooth E) by the wizards over at Jib Jab.
Kelly sat there watching the video, dumfounded. "What the hell am I doing in this video?" she said, quietly, over and over again, as we kept rewinding to 3:07.
"Manischewitzville" is attributed to one "Billy Ray Sheet," who happens to be in the punchline of one of my favorite corny jokes, which only a rabbi could love:
Q: Who are the three cowboys of the Adon Olam?
A: Billy Ray Sheet, Billy Tachleet, and Kid Ruchi.
Chag Pesach Kasher v'Sameach - Happy Passover, everyone.
P.S. The actual "Manischewitzville" is Cincinnati, Ohio - home of my alma mater, Hebrew Union College - Jewish Institute of Religion. It was founded there in 1888. Cincinnati is the city where Kelly and I met and were later married. Perhaps she was destined for Manischewitzville all along!
