Written in a late-night fit of anger at the Indypendent office and published on the newswire under a pseudonym, the piece went on to win an Independent Press Association Award (or “Ippie”) for Best Editorial from the Independent Press Association.

Gunn, a 15-year-old butch lesbian, was murdered in an anti-gay attack in Newark. What particularly rankled me was the tiny turnout at her vigil on the Christopher Street piers, mostly young queers of color. I was concerned then that the mainstream LGBTQ community was more preoccupied with assimilation for some than survival for all – and the ensuing near-decade has only proved my prescience.

The lack of attention given to the CeCe McDonald case, for example, has felt like Gunn’s murder all over again. McDonald, like Gunn, is a black woman attacked on the street, largely for her unconventional gender presentation. McDonald, unlike Gunn, fought back and survived and is now essentially being punished for defending herself – jailed on a second-degree manslaughter charge. As many see it, McDonald “will serve time simply because she managed to survive a violent attack.”

Yet McDonald’s case has received a fraction of the hubbub over Obama’s recent “evolution” on marriage, symptomatic of the mainstream LGB movement’s continuing inability to show up for all of its members. Regardless of how you feel about marriage itself, community survival must come first.

After all, you can’t buy wedding dresses if you’re dead.

This piece is very special to me, not just because Rich is one of my role models, but also because it allows me to graft two branches of my writing/editing career. I was a member of the Indypendent editorial collective from 2001 to 2003, working on nearly every aspect of bringing the paper to life: brain-storming what to cover; writing, researching and soliciting pieces; editing everyone’s content; and of course proofreading the whole thing meticulously. And from 1999 to 2007, I did much of the same work as an editorial collective member (and poetry editor from 2005-’07) of Bridges: a Jewish Feminist Journal, co-founded in 1990 by Adrienne Rich. It’s an honor to bring these two projects together.

I had the pleasure of sitting down with Ernie Capeci, who, though initially Hunt’s babysitting charge, eventually became his lifelong friend. He generously shared stories of their childhood neighborhood adventures, the origins of Muppet character Janice, Hunt’s experience of the AIDS crisis and his complex path to self-acceptance.

Jessica Max Stein and Ernie Capeci
Lower East Side, NY NY
March 2010

JMS: So first of all, how and when did you two meet?

EC: I remember the moment I met him. My parents hired him to babysit us for two weeks. They went on a vacation to Europe.

Nobody ever came back to babysit us twice. We were horrors. My parents had five kids in six years, so we were all roughly the same age, and every one of us was headstrong. We were tough kids. A guy up the block suggested Richard, who had just graduated high school, so it was around 1969.

I was a kid, I was about 13. I was mowing the lawn in the back of our house in Demarest, and I looked up and there was this guy, standing with his arms crossed, just staring at me. I remember he asked me what kind of music I liked, and I told him Jimi Hendrix, which he thought was cool.

My parents went off to Europe, and he moved in, and from then on, he was like my idol. He was unbelievable. Like I said, we were terrors, we were very physical, we were very rowdy, and he wound up terrorizing us – that was how he dealt with us. [laughs]

He shot flaming arrows at me. He was a big Errol Flynn fan, particularly back then. He loved swashbuckling movies.

He was really allergic to ragweed. There was ragweed all by the garage, and he paid me to go out and pick the ragweed. I had a target archery set that I hadn’t used since fourth grade. It was sitting around the house. He found it immediately. I leaned down to pluck up this ragweed and there was this boing, and an arrow was sticking out of the garage wall right over my head! [laughs]

He had never fired a bow before, as far as I know, and he was trying to shoot an arrow at me. I went crazy. I said, “That thing has three feathers, it could go anywhere, aaah!” Eventually we graduated to flaming arrows.

JMS: How do you even set the arrows on fire?

EC: He found rags, there’s always gasoline for the lawnmower… It became a game. Everybody started shooting. All my friends would come over, and we would assault him, basically. There would be twenty, twenty-five seventh-grade boys, and often my sisters and their friends too. Could be up to fifty children just running after him, throwing ourselves at him, attacking him.

He babysat me for two weeks. I didn’t see him for a year or so after that. I was a freshman in high school. We were hanging out in the street one day and all of a sudden this car came by with this guy hanging off of it with a movie camera, going, “Faster! Faster! Faster!” and this little blond kid riding a bicycle – it was Richard shooting a movie of [his brother] Adam, riding a bicycle down the street. We all chased after him – “Hunt! Hunt! Hunt!”

So there was a gap of about a year, where this crazy babysitter came into my life and left. And then soon after that, after I started high school [in 1970], we became friends.

JMS: What was he like then? It seems like he was different with different people.

EC: He had a lot of sides, and he was a natural actor. He grew up, as I understand it, feeling very much an outsider, and being mocked. I think like a lot of people he had, deep down, a lot of self-doubt that he fought his way through. A book he read all the time was Dune – the sci-fi book by Frank Herbert – and he was always big on that “fear is the mind-killer” thing. It’s part of the training that the good guys go through – “Fear is the mind-killer, fear is the mind-killer.” Richard really took that to heart. He just would throw himself into things.

I think he probably was a lot of things to a lot of people. I also think he, really like a lot of us, was finding himself, too. We put things out to different people. We also find ourselves reflected in other people in an interesting way.

He came up with some of his [Muppet] characters, when we were just smoking pot up in his room. Janice, I was there when he came up with her. Many of the characters came up with Richard just mocking people. The hippie chick was just like the hippie chick. That was something Richard did for years. The names came later.

Then I went away to college, so I missed a lot of the first four years of the Muppet Show. He came out to Oregon to see me a couple of times, though, from L.A. when they were doing movies. And I visited once or twice.

JMS: You went out to England? How was that?

EC: I liked it. I remember a lot of driving around. Richard had a tremendous sense of direction. He would drive around and pretend to be lost, and I would always be freaking out. “We can’t be lost in London. Look at this, there’s nothing square.” But he never was lost, ever.

He was always trying to get me to meet all these famous people, and it just scared the hell out of me. I remember going out to Woburn Abbey. We went around and saw all the old art, it was a great old abbey, beautiful, and then we pulled up to this beautiful building and he goes, “Oh, and this is the rectory,” and Cleo Laine came running out, “Oh, Richard, Richard, Richard!” We were at Cleo Laine and John Dankworth’s house! We spent the evening there being regaled. She was probably one of his favorite celebrities from the Muppet Show. Richard was always very comfortable. I was so awestruck.

I remember a birthday party that was thrown for him at someone’s house, one of the producers of the Muppet Show. The door opens, and everyone goes, “Oh, hi, Candy.” Candice Bergen comes in with this big cake of Adidas sneakers [like Richard often wore]. “Ernie, this is Candy.” I’m like, “I can’t believe you did this to me again!”

JMS: Can you tell me about Richard’s lover Nelson?

EC: He met Nelson [in the early 80s] through a friend named Dennis, who was a brilliant painter. Dennis was a straight guy, married at the time. Nelson was a friend of his, and Dennis decided he was gay, and he and Nelson did the whole bathhouse thing, the whole big kind of anonymous thing. But after something like six months or a year, he decided no, this isn’t for him.

Dennis was one of the first people anybody in our circle knew who died of AIDS. He died really horribly, but mercifully quick compared to a lot of people. Back then there were some really bad ones. That was awful. When I moved to New York, I’m straight myself, but there was something about that culture that was just so alive and free. Greenwich Village was just fantastic. And when that hit, and Reagan was president, it was really like some weird Biblical thing was being visited on us. It was very freaky.

Nelson was a brilliant artist. He was from Alabama. He worked for one of the ad agencies in graphics, but he had also gone to art school. Nelson painted abstracts. Richard had one hanging over his bed at his apartment on the Upper West Side right up until the end.

They lived together in the West Village for a while. They loved each other. Nelson was very quiet, very different from Richard. A very private guy. Richard had such a broad range of friends, but by and large they all tended to be raucous people. Theatrical, and not meaning of the theater, but people who were theatrical in their lives. But Nelson was very atypical. He was very shy, very reserved. I was at first kind of surprised. I thought he was very smart. Once you talked to him, he was a fascinating person.

I think Nelson was the first time he was in love with somebody where there was the possibility of a long-term relationship. And he was somebody who was looking for love as much as anything else. I know he went around to all those scenes, but I’m not sure how much he participated. That was never going to be Richard’s thing. He was all about falling in love.

After Nelson died [in 1985 of AIDS-related complications], Richard and I flew to Italy. He and Nelson had taken this big trip a couple years earlier, and we were going to go to a lot of the same places.

It was [December] ’86. America had just bombed Libya, and killed Muammar al-Gaddafi’s adopted daughter. Almost everybody in America cancelled their European vacation that year, for fear of terrorist reprisal. We got on a plane, there was a fuck-up with the travel agent; we were supposed to fly to Rome, but for some reason we were booked to Milan. We got off at Malpensa airport in Milan, which I believe translates into “bad thoughts”. We flew over there, there was more crew than passengers, and Richard had a pound of pot, probably an ounce of cocaine. I remember the crew didn’t have anything to do, so we’re sitting in the back, snorting coke with all the stewardesses, stewardesses running into the bathroom.

And then we get off the plane, in Milan – this place is empty. Richard says, “I want you to stand on a different line from me, because you look like a terrorist.” I had all this scraggly hair, my passport photo looked like a mugshot. He got on the one line, and I got on the other, and I just sat there and watched as a little dog walked up to him and went [sniffs], and they led him away.

He spent three days in jail. In New York, for what he was carrying, he would have gone to jail for at least a few years. Mandatory. In Italy they just wanted to kick him out of the country. But we flew in on the feast of the patron saint of Milan, on a Friday, and so there were no judges til Tuesday. So he spent three days in jail, I spent three days wandering around Milan. We went out to visit him one day.

The big joke was, it was supposed to be the most up-to-date prison, because it was a dirt floor, and the toilet was a hole in the ground. And we all said, “How was your cellmate Bruno,” and that kind of stuff. But I gather it was scary because he didn’t know the language, and they kept telling him he needed an avocado. He was like, “Why do I need an avocado?”

JMS: An avocado?

EC: Avvocato. It’s a lawyer. [laughs]

When he got arrested in Italy, one of the big things, worse than the drugs, was the fact that he was carrying Nelson’s passport, and they thought that meant he was up to some kind of a weird… You know, why do you have two passports? But it was just a memento. Part of that trip was, in Richard’s mind, that we were going to go to all these places where he went with Nelson, and he was going to be carrying Nelson’s passport.

Personally, I think for Richard that it’s better that he didn’t make that trip. I think there was something maudlin about it. That’s just me. But I think it might have been easier to let go, after being thrown in jail for carrying his passport. I don’t know.

Richard also, after Nelson died, steadfastly refused to get tested. Just didn’t want to know. That was the choice of a lot of people, because it was pretty much a death sentence. Although other people from the same time are still alive. It was a real crapshoot as to whether or not your doctors were guessing right. They tried so many different things.

JMS: When did he tell you he was HIV positive?

EC: That trip would have been ’86, which by then I’m sure he would have tested positive, had he done it. I would say ’87, at the earliest. Maybe it wasn’t til ’89. He might have gone a long time without getting tested.

My memory of it is that Richard, once he was diagnosed, he fought it. His doctor was very aggressive, and he tried all these different things. I recall that whole process as lasting about two years, and then he got sick. Once he really started to show all the avian stuff, and the Kaposi’s and all that stuff started happening, it was five, six months. Pretty quick as I recall. So maybe two years of trying to stave it off, all kinds of false hope, this and that, “Now my t-cell count is this.” But I honestly don’t know when he was diagnosed.

JMS: I’m getting mixed messages about how out he was. Some people have said he wouldn’t have liked being called a gay Muppeteer, that he was conflicted about it.

EC: I couldn’t tell you for sure. He had a lot of friends who were queens, for want of a better word. He’d say, “Oh, these are my queen friends,” and stuff, but he was a very macho kind of a guy. I think it was also, he grew up being called a fairy and things like that.

Richard’s favorite term, most of the period, was “funny boys”. He’d talk about gay people, he’d say “funny boys”. He didn’t like “queer”, he didn’t like “gay”, he didn’t like those terms. He’d say, “Well, funny boy,” this and that. That was the term he used. But he would also say “faggot” as much, if not more than I did, certainly more than I would around him and his friends.

JMS: Did he have girlfriends?

EC: Never. But he was real big on talking about it. Before he started admitting it to his friends – which to my recollection is sometime about my sophomore/junior year of high school, ’72, ’73 – he had almost gone all the way with this girl named “Julianna Davenport.” She was the most beautiful girl in his class. I remember that was a big thing. I remember being like, “Wait, you’re gay? But you almost went all the way with Julianna Davenport!”

Once he started being honest about it, he was never shy about it. To me he was always out. Coming out then was big. It wasn’t common. Certainly we knew, and he was open about it. But he was definitely conflicted about it. It was hard not to be, growing up in that world in that time. He tried very hard never to appear remotely effeminate. He wasn’t a macho guy by any means – we’re talking about a guy who listened to show tunes, for Christ’s sake.

JMS: And is a puppeteer.

EC: And is a puppeteer. Exactly. He fit the stereotype in so many different ways, and I think he didn’t like being perceived that way. I would not say, though, that he was in the closet. But Richard was not going to be marching in the parades, and things like that. That was not going to be happening.

JMS: Also, outside of the Muppets, he doesn’t really seem like a joiner.

EC: No. Like I say, he loved Errol Flynn movies. Richard was a swashbuckler in a lot of ways. He was very much into the individualism.

I personally feel, whatever, Richard’s way beyond all this. I have all kinds of spiritual concepts about afterlife and all that. I think if he’s looking on, he doesn’t really give a shit.

JMS: Were you at Richard’s memorial service?

EC: Yeah. At St John the Divine. It was very moving. It was huge. Ladysmith Black Mambazo sang, which is pretty big. And it was packed. There were a lot of people. I remember [Richard’s mother] Jane making a plea, how many people does this have to kill. Although it was this big thing, an event, and Richard loved the church and everything, I’m not sure how Richard it was, in a lot of ways.

Dave Goelz said a moving thing at Richard’s service. He said, and I agree with him, that he thought that when Richard got sick, he had finally started to accept himself. I think that’s true. I don’t think it was just his sexuality. There’s a certain basic self-loathing that takes a lot of time to get through, that’s societal. Whatever you are.

I thought he nailed it, myself, when he said that. Richard finally had acceptance, in a way. He had been fighting himself for so many years.

Colin Dabkowski does a nice tribute to them here, including a shoutout to yours truly! Hope they find a new space.

Sprang out of bed this morning at noon and raced into the park to birdwatch with the gang in Prospect Park. Today feels just like that Elizabeth Bishop poem, “The End of March”: raw grey weather, with thick clouds.

So a smaller crowd than usual: our leader Michelle, in her 50s, who admired my new binoculars (she’d advised me on what to get); a middle-aged couple, experienced birders; a peaceful guy I see around at the Coop; and a dyke couple in their 20s, both in down vests and hiking boots, both freckled with shiksa noses, leaning into each other as we stood peering at the birds. What a gift that would be: a peaceful companionate partner, happy to go birding in the crappiest of weather.

Some of the birders are ambitious, wanting to see certain birds, as if they have a checklist. It becomes a duty that way. I am grateful for all the birds I am given. I never tire of the robins. I know their call, I recognize them like a friend. The experienced birders are even dismissive of the cardinals, to me a bright startle every time. Although I did share their excitement at the Northern Flicker, spreading its yellow underwing, gliding deeper into the trees.

A new category of dyke, a new joke: not the cat lesbian, but the bird lesbian. Like the hiker dyke, but with binoculars. And probably more pockets.

Frozen hands when I got home. Ran them under hot water, a pleasure.

I appreciate your asking my advice.

My short answer to what ANY aspiring writer should do: Write.

Any aspiring writer should write, find your voice, find what you have to say, write because you enjoy it, because that enjoyment is what makes you a writer. Practice it like any other skill. Write, and start looking around for the magazines/journals/newspapers/websites/what-have-you that publish things similar to what you write. Look for their submission guidelines, and when you feel ready, send them things.

I have an M.F.A. in creative writing. However, you don’t need school to become a writer. Sometimes writing programs can make you self-conscious about your work, less free to simply do the writing you want to do. Writing programs are better once you feel relatively secure in your writing voice.

The writer/teacher life is a trade-off. I teach part-time, which is less secure, but leaves more time to write. Full-time college teachers are often expected to have a Ph.D. I don’t think this is worth it: 8+ years and too much debt for not enough job security. I know many people who have gotten a Ph.D. and not found work as professors, or found work only in places they’d rather not live (and sometimes live there anyway, unhappily). But some writers do get Ph.Ds, and teach, and write on their breaks. This is probably more suited to those who write scholarly work.

Alternatively, any number of jobs are delighted to have someone who works in words. Editing, copyediting, proofreading, freelancing… Even a receptionist or assistant is more valuable if he or she can dash off a clear letter or email or memo, etc.

Finally, even if you love writing, it need not be your day job. Writers need to have something to write about. If someone is only a writer, do they write about writing all day? Everything you learn and experience makes you a stronger writer, gives you a more developed mental model with which to understand and describe the world.

I hope this is helpful. Keep writing!

Boy, that wasn’t a question you heard every day.
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Ordinarily, you wouldn’t find me anywhere near a synagogue or a demonstration – at least not in the last few years – but put them together, and I was intrigued.

How does one prepare for a sacred ritual service that is also a political demonstration? Can these two intentions cohabitate in the same space? Does it cheapen or commodify the ritual to use it for political means; or, is it actually the highest expression of that ritual, making it alive and relevant to the present day?

And why does religious ceremony, at its heart, look so similar to a protest (and theater, for that matter) – create a space, set intentions, enact a ritual and see what happens? What would happen?
————————

The High Holydays – especially Rosh Hashanah and its ten-days-later counterpart, Yom Kippur – are the Christmas and Easter of Judaism. Even the Jews who never go to synagogue, like myself, will sometimes go on the high holydays, or at least feel guilty for staying home. Kol Nidre is the evening service that kicks off Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. There is no fun to be had on Yom Kippur: no food, no drink, no sex, and lots and lots of praying. You wear white and hit yourself in the chest for your “sins”. For me Yom Kippur is a dizzy memory of low blood sugar, even fainting a few years running, until I finally declared it inhumane and quit fasting. Let’s just say I have tremendous ambivalence about institutionalized Judaism.

To bend Thoreau a bit, I distrust any religion that requires new (or girly) clothes. Fortunately, since we would be holding services outside in 50-degree weather, I figured my usual pants were okay. I wanted to be able to run. I was terrified of getting arrested.

I had been to only a few protests since being entrapped and arrested by the NYPD at the 2004 Republican National Convention as part of an 1800+ person roundup of demonstrators and passersby. Many of us were housed at Pier 57, a bus garage full of soot and fumes. At Occupy Wall Street, the NYPD were employing the same scare tactics: They would surround a protest, with their bodies or orange netting or both, and then – with no warning, no call to disperse, no freedom to leave – the cops would lock up everyone present. Let’s just say I didn’t have it in me to go through this again.

But I wanted to go. I was tired of being frightened out of my right to assemble. I was tired of feeling like a “bad” Jew, if such a thing is even possible. Finally, holding Yom Kippur services at Occupied Wall Street seemed, in some ways, the perfect place for a holiday that is essentially about reminding ourselves that we are the 99%. The facebook invitation, written by Daniel Sieradski, says it best:

This Friday night begins Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar. On this day, Jews around the world refrain from all physical pleasures (eating, bathing and screwing, to name a few), and devote themselves to prayer and supplication, begging the Lord forgiveness of their sins so that they may be written into the Book of Life.

But is fasting and beating our chests really the best we can do to redeem ourselves?

As lower Manhattan erupts with thousands of protesters taking a stand against economic injustice, the words of the prophet Isaiah resonate more truthfully and appropriately than ever:

“Is not this the fast that I have chosen? to loose the fetters of wickedness, to undo the bands of the yoke, and to let the oppressed go free, and that ye break every yoke? Is it not to deal thy bread to the hungry, and that thou bring the poor that are cast out to thy house? when thou seest the naked, that thou cover him, and that thou hide not thyself from thine own flesh? Then shall thy light break forth as the morning, and thy healing shall spring forth speedily; and thy righteousness shall go before thee, the glory of the LORD shall be thy reward.”

Thus rather than spending the holiday safe and warm in our cozy synagogues thinking abstractly about human suffering, perhaps we should truly afflict ourselves and undertake the fast of Isaiah, by joining the demonstrators in Zuccotti Park, and holding our Yom Kippur services there amongst the oppressed, hungry, poor and naked.

Not to be cliché, but as Rabbi Hillel the Elder said, “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? But if I am only for myself, who am I? If not now, when?”

Ten minutes before the 7 pm service, Zuccotti Park was a carnival of overstimulation, sounds zinging off the surrounding metallic buildings, drums and cheering echoing from one end of the park, and the buzz of talking everywhere. The block-long park was packed with hundreds of people, many of them the scruffy early twenties boys that hung around the Indy office ten years ago (do they age?) – people holding up signs, sprawled on the ground, dishing out or slurping up food, reading the Occupied Wall Street Journal, sitting behind tables, sorting recycling, talking animatedly (some in Spanish) – but nothing that looked like a prayer gathering.

The other people looking for the service were easy to pick out: They looked much too clean to have been at the park very long, their hair shiny and combed, their white shirts glowing as if under black light. Two college girls with tiny overplucked eyebrows latched on to me as a guide; I led us over to the information booth and found out that services were back across Broadway. That’s how cacophanous it was: so much going on you could miss a thousand people gathered across the street.

Policemen in blue uniforms, and their bosses in white shirts, massed at the corner as we waited to cross Broadway. A car idled in the road as a girl handed a puppy to the driver through the window. This outraged one of the white shirts. “Keep it movin’, keep it movin!” he barked, pounding on the hood. The girl looked scared and instead got in the car with the puppy, and they drove off. The light changed and we crossed through the sea of policemen, exchanging wary glances.

Once across the street, services were easy to spot. A line of food carts, ironically, blocked off the fasting prayergoers from Broadway. About a thousand people sat in a circle, fifteen rings of people around the central speakers – Sarah Wolf, Avi Fox-Rosen and Getzel Davis. (I am deliberately calling them “speakers” rather than “leaders.” Easily a tangent: natural authority vs. institutionalized authority, giving them credit for their guidance of the group while affirming the collectivity of the event, et cetera.) They wore headlamps to light up their prayerbooks, which put me in mind of camping, making the service that much more unreal. They turned as they spoke, a lazy Susan of prayer, trying to engage every sector of the crowd.

My new friends and I ducked behind the big red statue — 25 policemen were just standing there in their blue uniforms, arms crossed, big clubs dangling from their belts. Quickly we skittered back around to the front of the statue. I spied Jess, an old protest acquaintance, and squeezed in behind her; she was sharing her prayerbook with Davi, another queer Jewish acquaintance. I knew them from different places, different New York eras of my life; while it didn’t surprise me that they knew each other, it made me glad that I’d trusted my community and shown up, instead of staying home for lack of a protest “buddy”. [Edit: Turns out they had just met. Proves my point even more.]

The crowd was mostly – but not all – Ashkenazi, largely people in their 20s and 30s but again not all, many older folks among us. The clothing issue was moot because most people had on their coats. Many wore tallises or fringed scarves.

At first I had trouble following the service. It was hard to hear, before I got the hang of the “people’s mic”. Sound equipment is not allowed, so speakers say a few words at a time and the listeners repeat it back through the crowd, like an echo: DIY amplification. I liked not being miked — made it less performative (“the rabbi show”) and more interactive. You actually had to pay attention to what was being said, because you had to pass it on, and in doing so got a moment to consider how you felt about the message. Also, you were needed by the people behind you who couldn’t hear. You were connected.

This was especially powerful in Davis’ sermon. Imagine this being passed back through an echo circle:

According to our myth (“According to our myth”), Yom Kippur is the day that we are forgiven for worshipping the golden calf. What is the golden calf? It is the essence of idol worship. It the fallacy that gold is G!d. How do we become forgiven for worshiping gold?

You know friends, it is hard not to worship gold, or power, or any of the other idols that our society shoves down our throats. I believe that this is why the Torah tells us that there is something else created in the image of G!d.

Us.

Imagine this moving through the crowd, a verbal wave: Us.

Us.

Us.

Instead of the traditional Aleinu, people shouted out resolutions for the coming year. “I love this prayer,” I said. “I wanted to sing it.” “Me too,” said a girl beside me. “Let’s sing.” So we did. It was oddly moving, our voices singing the old words amidst all that chaos, both of us knowing the tune without having to check in.

All the up-and-down of the service is a pain in the butt when you are actually in a shul with an actual seat, but even more of a pain (and hard on the knees!) when you are sitting in a huge crowd on concrete, and have to fight for your two inches of space every time you sit down again.

Overall very surreal: the sacred day, the huge crowd, the scowling cops, the familiar prayers. The smell of felafel wafted over from the food carts; the parade of protesters went by a couple times, replete with whistles, bells and instruments.

Strangest, perhaps, to say the Shma with all those people. It felt too public for such a sacred one-with-the-deity prayer. I had to cover my eyes, and even then it felt strange, too intimate to share, almost a violation.

Afterwards was the usual schmoozing, my favorite part of both shul and demonstrations. Lots of queer Jews and theater people, the JFREJ crowd. Some people seemed exhausted and overwhelmed; some had energy to spare, singing “Lo Yisa Goy” along with a guitar player, god bless hippie Jews. I gave and got a lot of hugs, shana tova, shana tova. A few of the Rude Mechanicals invited me to eat but I wanted to go home, clear out some space, burn some incense, look at the trees.

I wish I could say I had some moment of realization, some magical feeling of belonging, but I didn’t. I left feeling spooked by all the police, annoyed that I didn’t feel like I had more “buddies,” more safety. I didn’t feel inspired to go to synagogue again, nor another protest, though I was glad to have done my combined duty and shown up for both. I was glad to have been there, but I still felt alienated, still felt relieved to come back to my familiar apartment and reacquaint myself with my sacred objects. I fell asleep early and dreamed of dead loved ones; when I woke it took longer than usual to remember that they were gone.

While the setting of Occupied Wall Street was in some ways beautifully in keeping with the spirit of Yom Kippur, in other ways it felt fundamentally at odds. At one point I turned to the girl beside me and said it felt blasphemous to have the service with all these buildings around. “How can you pray to God when you can’t even see the trees, let alone the moon?”

But that’s probably another story.

Amen.

(For Jamie, who said, “I can’t wait to read it!”)