Wanna Play Bar Mitzvah?

Remember that joke. You'd ask a friend if he/she wanted to play bar mitzvah then you'd walk over to them and pinch their cheeks real hard pretending you're the doting aunt - OH Beryl you're so cute, you've grown up into such ah handsome boy, blah blah blah.

This morning was my son's bar mitzvah. We had a modest but nice affair at the local synagogue, which we never attend with his entire 6th grade class, plus his teacher (so his classmates don't get out of hand) and my friends and brothers-in-law from Canada. Of course, the guests came late and the young man who taught my son how to read from the Torah hadn't shown up yet, so we couldn't start. My brother, punctual as a German general, kept on popping up looking annoyed, asking when we're gonna start. Can't start without his teacher, bud. Then his teacher called and told me he was at the other community center because he thought it was over there, so I had to have one of the boyfriends go and fetch him. I don't think anyone was particularly upset at starting late except for my brother and his wife.

The services began and I sat in the front row, taking photographs from the balcony as the synagogue was Orthodox and women sat up in the balcony with the men sitting on the bottom. Then my son's turn was up. He took out the velvet Torah scroll from the Ark and I prayed he wouldn't drop it - it's probably not very light. And he read from it beautifully. He kept on warning me beforehand that he'd laugh or fart or do something to totally embarrass us, but it never happened. We all took toffees and threw them at him after he was done. My Gypsy friend Amoun came and I don't think she was ever at a synagogue before. I wonder what she thought of the leather armbands the men wore during the morning service and the priestly blessings, etc.

My girlfriends told me even though my son was the eldest in his class, all the boys in his class seemed to already have grown these beginner moustaches, except for him. They wondered why.

"Oh that's because their mothers have them!" was my brother-in-law's theory. We were hysterical.

After services we all went into the small community center for brunch. They really did up the room nicely with burgandy and cream tableclothes, flower arrangements, exotic fruit platters and someone serving omelettes and pancakes. I was busy running around, finding people, arranging when the juggler would entertain and getting calls from the Hasidic street dancers we found in Jerusalem to liven things up. I'm usually the first to eat but I could only manage to down a few bites of a bagel and a cup of orange juice. Everyone else seemed to be enjoying themselves, but I was the photographer and if I didn't capture these moments, they'd be lost and vaguely remembered in our imagination.

By noon, it was over and I was exhausted. As if I had baked all the muffins and made all the salads. And only when it was over did we realize we wrote and typed up speeches which we never made. Everything happened too fast. My kids grilled me on what I paid to which entertainer, caterer. "You paid 500 shekels to the Hasidic dancers. Now they're gonna go out and buy ecstasy with that money." The girls believe you can only dance like a dervish if you're on a particular substance. I don't really care what they buy with the money they earned because they gave us wonderful blessings.

So my son is now a man. A teenager. Yikes!