Little Chicken Media

Posted By Hinda Mandell on December 4, 2009

I'm on the right. Verging on my awkward years. Do you see a Chelsea resemblance?

I’m three weeks older than the former first daughter, Chelsea Clinton, but we have more than a February b-day in common. We have, historically at least, our looks.

Check out the slide show of Chelsea through the years.

Now as you can imagine for an awkward, gangly 13-year-old (I’m talking about myself here), it was a self-esteem deflator to learn that the first daughter – who everyone seems to think you resemble – is an ugly duckling.

Back in 1998, Senator John McCain crafted a joke so mean about Chelsea (and Hillary) that many newspapers decided not to print it. Careful what you say, Mr. McCain, because karma can come back and bite you in the tushy big time (2008 presidential election, anyone?)

But there was an upside to the little-Maidel-gets-mistaken-for-the-first-daughter thing.

Attention!

I have fond memories, as an awkward, gangly 13-year-old, of visiting my brother at his Midwestern University and a group of people shouting, “Chelsea, Chelsea!” And pointing at me. A crowd soon gathered.

Imagine the guilt that I felt to have let them down. It was just me. Young Maidel, captain of the mock-trial team, from a Minneapolis suburb.

With my little sister on the day of her bat-mitzvah. Is the Chelsea resemblance clearer?

Fast forward 10 years and I learn that a boyfriend – I think two of them actually – had crushes on Chelsea when they were younger. I guess they have a type. Call it the first-daughter-resemblance type.

Now, of course, Chelsea’s all the rage. Her red hair is now blonde. The frizz is now sleak. And she landed a Jewish hottie from a prominent family with their share of juicy histories.

As for my hair? It’s still got the frizz, kinks and waves. Anyone know Chelsea’s stylist?

On second thought, maybe Bill’s my father?

Mom! We’ve gots to talk.

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Posted By Hinda Mandell on December 4, 2009

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Posted By Hinda Mandell on December 2, 2009

Looking to spice things up in the bedroom this Chanukah season?

Forget a game of strip dreidel. Instead, consider scheduling a pap smear for the woman in your life.

Say what, Chanukah Harry?! Have you gone meshuganah?

If the Jewish Santa hasn’t gone crazy, it looks like CBS just ingested a pair of laced lattkes. The Forward newspaper has reported – and the Web site of CBS confirms – that the broadcasting network has separate public service announcements catering to Jewish and Christian audiences. The goal? Yes, you guessed. It’s to make sure your woman gets a pap smear (or her pap shmeared in the Jewish case) this ho, ho holiday season.

Check out the promos here. (It may take a minute to load but it’s totally worth it!)

The Jewish version reads as follows (with ethnic-appropriate Klezmer playing in the background):

Want to do something special for your woman this Chanukah?

Schedule her a pap smear

Just a smear could save her life

Light up her menorah with a gift that says

You look great

But it’s what’s on the inside that counts

The version targeted toward the Christmas-celebrating crowd reads (with chimes jingling in the background) :

Want to do something special for your woman this holiday season?

Call her doctor and schedule her pap smear

Pap smears save lives

This holiday season give her the gift that says you look great

But it’s what’s inside that counts

Of course, it’s worth noting that the guy doing the Jewish promo has a Yiddishe nasally voice. His Christian cohort has a much manly huskier tone to his baritone. And he’s got the Hollywood good looks, too.  What do both versions have in common? A tone of patriarchy (hat tip to Simone). Get on the phone, fellas! It’s time to schedule your ‘lil lady a smear!

The upside? Apparently the speculum provides a surefire way to get laid afterwards.

Tis the season to get smeared!

Category: Maidel & Faigel | 3 Comments »
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Posted By Hinda Mandell on December 1, 2009

We love our parents. But sometimes (or always) they embarrass us. And sometimes (or always), regardless of this, we think they’re really, really cool. My mom, a poet, wrote this poem when I was living at home from age 22-24. Back then I was studying the Middle East as a master’s student, but from the frequency of my intense phone conversations, you’d think I was studying the ever-elusive guy-girl relations.

Even though I shouted into the phone every night, documenting and analyzing the romantic exploits of myself and my friends, I didn’t realize that my mom might overhear such drama. Well folks, she did. Here’s the poem she wrote as a result.

Maidel at Home

By Karen Mandell

He’s such a dick, she screams into the phone.

All the words I banned when she was ten

reappear, like bulbs thrusting out of the ground,

petals shielding stamens, ovary. Maybe she should

just hook up with him, my girl says. Matter of fact.

What a prick. At thirteen, I wrote PRICK

on my friend’s arm with ballpoint. Banned from her house

for a month. When she remembers, my girl closes the door.

A little privacy for the phone calls. Then I hear muffled

giggling, shrieks. Silence too. So like the sounds

of sex. When I bring her laundry, she’s on the bed,

computer in lap, hair pinned up, calls me mommy.

Like a sheen of clouds covering the moon then vanishing,

childhood slips away from her face. I stand there

memorizing. What, she says, then picks up the phone

on the first ring. Did you get any? Why not? Laughs,

then remembers me. I know, girls have to talk.

I back out, the hall air arid. Her bedroom’s

a hothouse, close, moist. When she was little,

I’d kneel and unpeel her layers saying you’ll get

overheated.  And now she is, she is.

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Posted By Hinda Mandell on November 30, 2009

Robert - shirtless - heads off in search of Jewish history in Lagow, Poland.

Did you hear the one about the Jewish graduate student who was greeted by a man carrying an ax in her grandfather’s Polish village?

Oh wait, that actually happened. To me.

This is where you’re supposed to shake your head at the rampant anti-Semitism in Poland today. And then, on cue, I say “hold up! It’s not what you think.”

Really, it isn’t.

This July I toured Poland with a group of graduate students studying post-War religious life in the country. One week into the trip we took a detour to the former shtetl town known as Lagow, the town my grandfather fled in 1939, leaving behind a wife and family who would perish in Treblinka. We were there with the intent to knock on a few doors, hopefully capturing a few nostalgic recollections about my grandfather and his family. Very “Everything is Illuminated.” Knock we did – but to little fanfare – since no one seemed to remember Muttie Waysdorf and his family (although I did meet a lovely elderly couple that invited me for tea). Unfulfilled, our group of eight headed back to the van.

That’s when I noticed the shirtless, sweaty man carrying the ax.

I couldn’t manage much more than an impotent “um …” in the direction of our guides*, hoping that they could disarm the potential attacker with a few not-so-subtle jujitsu moves. Maybe it’s because I’m from the Boston suburbs and have therefore never laid eyes on an ax in 3D. But if Hollywood teaches us one thing, it’s that nothing ends well when a shirtless man walks toward you with an ax. At your grandpa’s former village in Poland. And you’re Jewish.

“Don’t tell me you brought Jews here!” shouted the shirtless axman in Polish. The man, whose name I would soon learn was Robert, was offended. I watched – freaked out – as the axman, his tool positioned by his hip, exchanged word with our Polish guides.

As it turned out, the whole thing was one big misunderstanding. Hah! (Any misunderstanding involving an ax is a relief.)

Yet Robert was indeed peeved that the guides “brought Jews here.” The reason? He was the keeper of Lagow’s Jewish memory. Other guides should not trespass on his territory!

To prove his good intentions, Robert said he kept in his possession the one remaining piece of the pre-War Lagow synagogue. And it was mine for the taking – if I were to buy him a new bike so he can ride like Lance Armstrong.

Robert trekked back to his place to retrieve the piece of stone. When the guides saw it they exchanged glances. It wasn’t a relic from the synagogue. Its Hebrew lettering indicated it was part of a tombstone.

I took down Robert’s address. One day I may be inclined to send an ax-carrying man in Poland a bike, in exchange for a chunk of my family’s history. But you never know. Another Jewish heritage-seeker might have already made her way into Lagow. And a certain Polish man might be cruising the countryside in a sparkling two-wheeler. Like Lance Armstrong.

* Special thanks to Tomek Kuncewicz and Maciek Zabierowski, Polish guides extraordinaire, of the Auschwitz Jewish Center in Oswiecim, Poland.

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Posted By Hinda Mandell on November 25, 2009

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Posted By Hinda Mandell on November 25, 2009

By Faigel

I became a vegetarian at 19. I was working at a health food store when my colleague, who also read my animal totem and frequently massaged my chi, insisted that I read John Robbins’ “Diet for a New America.”

“It’ll change your life,” she insisted on a particularly lazy summer day at the store.

It did. I read the book in one night and have sworn allegiance to an at-times-strict vegetarianism ever since. Yet being a vegetarian is an issue in a family where your mom makes her own kielbasa from scratch. It wasn’t an easy transition. So many of the celebrations in my family revolve around food – and I don’t just mean sauerkraut. I mean real, ethnic Eastern European foods: goulash, golumpki, and, everyone’s favorite, blood sausage.

And while my family grudgingly came to accept my vegetarianism (they abhor my tofu as much as I do their meat!), the one tradition my mother was never willing to forfeit was Thanksgiving dinner.

“Eat some turkey!” she pleas every year. “It’s not meat!”

I suppose for some lay-vegetarians it’s not. But poultry is meat in my book.

In recent years, though, things have become more interesting. My mom has substituted her halfhearted appeals with her checkbook.

“Five hundred dollars,” she offered about five years into my vegetarianism.

“Mooom, you can’t buy my morals,” I responded, my whiny Cleveland accent my only weapon against her enticing offer.

“Like hell I can’t! One thousand dollars.”

Someone pass me a drumstick.

Truthfully, I’ve never been able to take my mom up on the offer, which she’ll gladly remind me is on the table every year. It’s not that I can’t use the money, or that I’m too proud to take her money, it’s just, well, the thought of eating flesh makes me green with nausea. I’ve never fully understood why something else should have to die just so I can be nourished. Especially in a world where there are so many alternatives.

So, come Thursday my mom will wake up at 5 a.m., just as my sister and I are coming in from a night of partying with our hometown friends, and prepare a 20-pound bird. Later at dinner, I’ll sit smug in my self-righteousness carving my tofurkey. And although my Ph.D. student salary prevents me from doing so presently, I anticipate the day when I can slice a thick piece of tofu, hold it up to my mom and declare, “five hundred dollars …”

Category: Maidel & Faigel | 3 Comments »
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Posted By Hinda Mandell on November 24, 2009

By Maidel

Home for the holidays. The cranberries. The gravy. The pumpkin pie. And the backhanded compliments.

Courtesy of mama: “Honey. You look so sweet in that blue, turtleneck sweater with the dreidels on it. But it wouldn’t hurt you to show some cleavage, if you know what I mean!”

Family love. You need body armor to remain unscathed.

When I think of the holidays and my meshuganah (English = totally insane) family, I am repeatedly called back to an incident more than a decade ago. It happened at the Passover table, when a family friend asked my big brother – then a hormonal college student – what he considered to be the most important aspect of his relationships.

No courteous or romantic remarks from him. Nah.

“Sex,” he said.

Awkward silence does not pair well with the turkey.

New Rule: ear plugs required at all family gatherings. Say what you want. But I don’t wanna hear it.

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Posted By Hinda Mandell on November 21, 2009

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Posted By Hinda Mandell on November 19, 2009

By Faigel

“I need some straight men in my life!” the Maidel pined at Sunday brunch over vegan bacon, organic, cage-free eggs, and French-pressed coffee.  The three gay men sitting at the table stared back at her.

“Me too,” said one.

The second one wrinkled his forehead, frowning his eyes sympathetically.

“Maidel, I don’t really know any single, straight guys,” I replied.  “What is it?” I questioned, wiping some soy cheese from my bottom lip. “Are you lonely or just…?

“Just what?” she squawked back.

I considered the possibility of asking her if she was just horny and then quickly reconsidered; the Maidel doesn’t necessarily deal well with such directness when it comes to talking about sex.

“You know, maybe you’re just feeling a little …  randy?”

She blinked at me, pondering the statement-turned-question.

“It’s not that I want to have sex,” she began. “But the possibility of sex would be nice.”

(Lock up your sons, the Maidel is in heat!)

I would love to be able to say that I have the perfect guy for the Maidel. She’s intelligent, sophisticated, and she’s got her life together. I imagine she’s a wonderful girlfriend. It’s just that I don’t know any single, straight guys. Maybe that cliche that men are like parking spaces (all the good ones are either taken or handicapped) is true.

“Well, if you meet anyone …” she trailed off, Nigel the Lhasa Apso happily panting on her lap.

“What’s so bad about being single?” I began to wonder in a Carrie Bradshaw-esque manner. You have tons of freedom to do whatever you want, no one ever expects you to pick up the check, there are no misplaced expectations, and you’re only accountable to yourself.  My line of thought, however, was interrupted by a text message.

“Meteor shower?” it read.

The Leonid meteor shower was set to kick off in a few hours, during the wee hours of the morning.

“Absolutely!” I replied enthusiastically.

Later that night (or very early the next morning, depending on how you look at it) I was sitting on a cold slab of concrete overlooking a dark field, watching the heat escape my body in crystalline breaths. The clear night sky was resplendent with thousands of glowing dots.

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen a shooting star before,” said my companion, his chocolate eyes gazing upwards.

And suddenly a luminous streak shot across the sky. My insides became taut with palpable excitement.  For a millisecond I was reminded of my humanity, my own insignificance.

“Did you see that?” his excited tone grounded my mind’s ephemeral wandering.

“Yes.” And I knew I had seen exactly what he had — not a meteoroid rupturing and imploding as it entered Earth’s atmosphere, but instead a material iteration of our shared impermanence.  The connection was immediately intoxicating.

I smiled.

Maybe that’s why the good parking spaces are so fucking hard to find.

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