Three unrelated topics for today.

(1)

Yesterday, at post-Shabbat service kiddush, my artist friend Barbara G_______ (she can identify herself if she wishes) complemented my kippah, and asked me if I remembered where I got it. I told her the story.

About 50 years ago, my original law firm, Lane and Edson, had a paralegal named Emily C_______. She was about my age, came from Philadelphia, and was raised Christian. But she discovered a grandparent (or a great-grandparent) who had been Jewish and decided she felt more Jewish than Christian, so she studied and converted. She then decided to move to Israel, and before she left, she knitted me this kippah.

I lost track of her after she moved. But use this kippah often.

This all happened when we at Lane (originally Levine) and Edson (originally something like Eisenstadt) had been trying to lose our identity as an all Jewish firm. I was the 7th lawyer in the firm, all Jewish, as were the next three or four.

We thought we had finally accomplished our goal when we hired a lawyer and a paralegal with very Irish names, both starting work the same day. It turned out that our Irish lawyer (you know who you are) had a Jewish mother (that did not come up in the interviews), and our paralegal was only Irish by marriage. Well, we tried.

We actually did hire a gentile lawyer, Jack Betz, my late friend, who always said he was only hired so someone would answer the phone on Yom Kippur. In fact, this is not true, but in fact it was nice that someone could answer the phone on Yom Kippur.

Jack showed us up a decade or so later, when he quit the practice of law, went back to school, and became an ordained Lutheran minister, shepherding congregations in Baltimore, Pensacola, and Beaufort SC.

(2) So, on June 26 (daughter Hannah’s birthday, by the way), I had one of my regular lunches with my good friend and college roommate Doug F__________ at the Shanghai Lounge in Glover Park on Wisconsin Avenue.

The next morning, I went to Breads Unlimited to buy my weekly challah, opened my wallet to get my credit card, and it wasn’t there. I used a different card, but knew that I must have left my card at the Shanghai Lounge. So, I went home and called Shanghai and was told that they did not have my card. So it goes, I said to my self (not really), and I canceled my card and ordered a new one.

For those of you who see my Facebook entries, you might recall that this is when the rep on the phone fed me the following line: “Would you like me to expedite delivery of your new card at no extra charge.”

That offer sounds too good to be true, doesn’t it? (These days anything good sounds too good to be true; have you noticed?) But two days later, a Fedex envelope with my card arrived and I was surprised to see that it had the same number as my old card. Well, I said, maybe they know something I don’t (and having the same number would relieve me of listing a new card on so many websites), so I called to activate it. It was activated; I got an email message from MasterCard telling me it was activated. But, the two times I tried to use it, it did not work.

I called the bank again. This time, a rep told me she had no idea why they sent me the same number on a new card. She told me that they would send me another new card with a new number. She didn’t say anything about expediting it for no cost, but lo and behold, again two days later, a new card came with a new number. I have now activated the new card, this time by using a QR code, rather than making a telephone call. I have not tried the new card yet, but I am sure it will be fine.

Yesterday afternoon, I sat down to enter my recent purchases into our Quicken account (why we do this, I do not know, but we do), and I discovered something unexpected. The evening after I thought I had lost the card at Shanghai Lounge, I had gone to Lalibela Ethiopian restaurant, now on Georgia Avenue, and bought some vege combos for dinner. When I looked at that invoice to enter into Quicken, I saw that I had used the lost card. I now know, too late to do anything about it, why Shanghai Lounge did not have my MasterCard. It is at Lalibela. Such is life, I said to myself (this time, for real).

(3) We recently watched the new documentary, Jayne, on HBO. It’s about Jayne Mansfield and was put together by one of her daughters (she had five children) who was only 3 when her mother died in an automobile accident. She has no real life memories of her mother.

I am not going to give away the various twists (you should watch the film), but will tell you that Mansfield was far from the airhead, sex symbol blond that she reluctantly  pretended to be for the sake of a career. Even though she had her first child at 16 or 17, she managed to learn to speak five languages (English, Spanish, French, Italian and Hungarian) and to play both piano and violin more than passably well. She also managed to have three husbands and public relationships with two others. And she was only 34 when she died.

How much had you accomplished at age 34?