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I’ve got a new post at Jewschool, in which I examine an article Alan Dershowitz wrote about Israel Apartheid Week.

Too often in conflicts we don’t hear stories.  We don’t know what other people have experienced.  This, I believe, is the root of many social problems.

Political realities are ultimately inseparable from the individual experiences that give rise to them.  We can make generalizations about societal states of understanding, political theories, and large social constructs, but these must ultimately be grounded in a deep understanding of the individual, human nature of the issue.

At its heart, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a failure of understanding.  Yes, we can and do identify policies, tactics, and manners of thought that continue it, but we cannot forget their inalienably human attributes.  Applying the analytical tools of anthropology and other social sciences can tell us much about why the conflict has evolved the way it has.  Why, for instance, does the Israeli government continue to lend tacit, if not explicit, support in most cases, to settlers who are actively violating international law and soiling Israel’s credibility?  Why have Palestinian civilians been so easily represented by the few who decide to blow themselves up?

These are questions of understanding.  I have strong disagreements with many people involved in the conflict, but there comes a time when I have to admit that I just don’t understand their point of view.  I haven’t been to Israel or Palestine, I haven’t sat down across the table with these people and tried to understand what makes them tick.

I don’t think this makes me less capable of making strong and accurate judgments on the issue, but it does impart on me a responsibility to seek out such stories and incorporate them into my thought.  In fact, I would argue that no one is exempt from this responsibility.  Divorced as I am from the on-the-ground realities of the conflict, it’s easy for me to say that my priority is understanding.  For an Israeli in Sderot who’s lived through rocket attacks and seen their children traumatized and suffering from PTSD, or for a Palestinian in Gaza who’s lived through massive Israeli air raids, destruction of vital infrastructure, and a continuing blockade, it must be incredibly hard to understand the other.

But there are those who do.  There are those who put aside their own experiences, and, given the opportunity to do so without sacrificing basic needs, seek out the other’s perspective.  And the fact that those people exist means that we should not just expect others to do the same, but we should strive for circumstances where they can.

Both in his attempts to understand and his attempts to empower others to do the same, Avi Schaefer was one of those people dedicated to understanding.  After graduating high school in Santa Barbara, he joined the IDF and spent several years as a counterterrorism instructor.  To a naive American Jewish boy like me who’s never held a gun, it’s hard to comprehend his motivations.  But it was crystal clear to me from the moment I met him up until the last conversation I had with him that he wanted me to, and he wanted to comprehend mine.  Avi was in many ways extremely oxymoronic; but then, he existed almost for the purpose of defying those same oxymorons.  Before I met him, I would never have guessed that an American Jew who became an Israeli citizen in order to join the IDF would be more dedicated to peace than arguably any other person I have ever met.  But what Avi has taught me was that that doesn’t have to be a contradiction.  That the only thing standing between us and a deeper personal understanding of the other is our assumptions.  If we come to a discussion with an open mind and no assumptions, we inevitably walk away stronger and smarter.

Avi Schaefer was killed in the early morning of February 12th by a drunk driver on the streets of Providence.  Who Avi was doesn’t make his death more tragic than if it had been someone else, but the people he touched, the good he did in his short time with us, and the taste that is left on our tongues, will linger.  In Avi, a man of incredible virtue and dignity walked among us.

“An enemy is someone whose story we have not yet heard.”  Avi attributed this quote to his father, Rabbi Arthur Gross-Schaefer.

Avi Schaefer, 1988-2010.  Z”L.  May his memory be for a blessing.

What makes someone want to become a campus police officer?  I say this in all seriousness.  Not at all to demean them.  I’m really curious.  Being a normal cop is definitely a drag sometimes – you have to do stuff like traffic that I could imagine being pretty boring.  But you also see a lot of things, I imagine you learn a lot about society, and you can genuinely help people.  Not to glorify the dirty work, but I can empathize with that feeling of wanting to actually get out on the street and help someone who’d be getting hurt otherwise.  To be honest, I sometimes think that if I have grand ideas about politics and helping people, I should work as a police officer first.  Then I’d have a real understanding of how the problems I’m claiming to come up with solutions for actually look in real life.

The same motivations of wanting to help people could apply to someone wanting to become a campus police officer.  You’d help people stay safe in a new place, living away from home from the first time, etc.  But there’s another aspect to it that I started thinking about last night.

Last night, I went to a 1920s themed party at a dorm on campus.  I had heard about it from a lot of cool people, and it was billed as having a live jazz band, lots of dancing, and I figured it would be a cool scene.  I expected that there’d be some drinking, but from the way it was described, it sounded like it would be mostly a fun scene.

So I got dressed up, and headed over a bit after ten.  It quickly became clear that the party was not at all what I had expected.  It was extremely crowded, and if there was a live band, I didn’t see it (there was a drum set in one corner of one room, but no one was playing).  There was of course an iPod sound system blaring some typicalish dance music.  And the drinking scene was way beyond what I had been expecting.  It was totally out of control.  About three minutes after I got there, the campus cops showed up and everyone had to leave.  It was a big disappointment given the fact that I was expecting some socializing (I didn’t really care if there was a bit of alcohol – I wasn’t planning to drink either way), good dancing, and a laid back night.  None of those things happened.

As I was leaving with the same friends I had come with, I was thinking about what the cops must think.  It must feel so hopeless.  So futile.  I mean, maybe some of them had bad experiences with drinking, or knew someone who was badly hurt in a drinking-related incident, and decided to take it into their own hands.  But it must be so hard to carry on, busting up one alcohol-soaked party after another.  It must feel like there’s nothing you can do.  No matter how many drunk kids you kick out, no matter how many times you make someone leave who potentially could have hurt themselves or gotten hurt later, there will always be another.  I suppose there’s a satisfaction in knowing that you helped even one person, but it’s not like that’ll make it stop.  For every person who is reformed like that and doesn’t do it again after such a close call, there are a hundred who just carry on.

It must take a lot of perseverance to keep going with that job, feeling as though you can never really have an effect.  I have an enormous amount of respect for someone who makes that decision.  I don’t know if I’d be able to.  But I almost feel like I should, like if I’m not going to engage in the kind of behavior they’re up against every night, that I should be out there helping them.  Maybe there’s no place for taking a back seat here.  Maybe I need to get off my high horse of moral superiority and just try to help someone out.

I don’t know if that’s what the cops actually think about it.  This is all purely speculation.  But I do know that this is a societal problem.  Can the cops fix it?  I don’t know that either.  But they’ve got an incredibly important job to do.  No matter what the politicians are doing, no matter how society is changing or staying the same, they’re there to make sure it happen safely.  To me, the institution of the police is one of the most important there is.  It’s a government agency that exists for no reason other than us.  No politics, no values, just priorities.  Safety and respect.  Those are elements of a civil society that don’t exist in a lot of places.  During the Bush years, when our civil liberties were being assaulted left and right, and our country was making a mockery out of its core values domestically and internationally, I would hear people say that we were living in a dictatorship, that our government was no better than a military junta, and I would say, no, that’s not true.  Because we could wake up in the morning and know that there wouldn’t be a mob running through the street.  This country’s ability to maintain peace and domestic tranquility through changes of power and huge catastrophic events is incredibly important.  It’s something that we should treasure, and not write off thoughtlessly.  Without that support from the bottom up, none of the institutions we prize would function.

It’s not always perfect.  There are corrupt or inefficient police forces all over the place.  But in the big picture, they’re the exception, not the rule.  I look at police as a body of people who, as a general rule, genuinely want to help people.  And as such, I maintain a great deal of respect for them, and a great deal of sympathy for the things they deal with every day so that we don’t have to.

The question is, should we?

It’s pretty different, to say the least.  Living on my own poses some definite challenges.  I have a nasty cold, and there is no one to bring me soup or tea.  And I realized that I didn’t know where the Health Services building was.  That’s no good.  I had to go out and buy myself a thermometer and cough syrup.  I mean, in normal life, these are just things that I expect to be there.  But I guess someone had to buy them at some point.  Which is an interesting thing to think about.  At what point in your life, living on your own or with someone else, do you buy household things?  Plates, Advil, soap, etc.?  I guess I’m more self-sufficient now.

I’m swamped with work.  And that’s even after I switched out of the basic freshmen Chem class down to an introductory one that is more appropriate to my level.  I’m in a math class that’s intended more for math majors, so it’s very theoretical and proof-based.  I like it, but it’s definitely my most difficult class.

I also don’t really like having huge lecture classes.  There are so many people in them who have so many interesting things to say, but I don’t get to here most of them.  It’s a bummer.  It’s also demoralizing, and a hard thing to pay attention to first thing in the morning because of how impersonal it is.

I’m adjusting to the whole experience in some ways, but in others I think my Western-MA, small-homey-school mentality that I’ve been operating within my whole life is pretty deeply embedded in me.  And I’m okay with that.  I find myself feeling lost in such a huge place as this.  Not to say that I don’t have friends or feel comfortable around people.  I just don’t like not knowing everyone.  It’s weird that I see people I don’t recognize every day.  In my dorm, even.  I feel like if you live in the same building as people, you should know them.  It’s weird.

I’m definitely learning a lot.  I do have one class that’s a small seminar, on Talmud, which is great.  I mean, all of my classes are, but this one’s just very personal, and the other people in it are really smart and talkative.  We’re going to cover various aspects of the Talmud, including historical background and context, legality, morality, ethics, and others.

Also, I am swing dancing weekly.

It’s going to be a good four years.  Tiring, but good.

Last night, I attended the third of our mandatory class meetings.  The first was on alcohol use, the second on issues of identity and bias, and this one was on sexual assault.  Oddly enough, I had actually been looking forward to it the most, because I thought that it would be the most applicable presentation.  The first two were certainly interesting (great speakers, excellent presentations), but this one went beyond.  The featured speaker was Katie Koestner, whose story and presentation were incredible.  I’ve never seen so many people so attentive.  I don’t think I heard a word spoken out loud throughout the entire thing.

But what I really want to write about is a discussion I had afterwards.  I approached some of the event coordinators who had told us how to get involved with some peer-education programs, to ask some questions, and got involved in a discussion with another guy about the ability to criticize the actions of a victim of such abuse.  The discussion lasted a while, but where it ended up was with the concept of a threshold of doubt; a point past which we have no reliable way of asserting how we would act in a situation.  I submit that rape is over such a threshold.  None of us can predict how we would act given such an intensely demoralizing and disempowering event.

That being said, the guy I was discussing with made the very good point that if we always hold off on judgment based on a lack of certainty, we never reach any conclusions, because nothing is certain.  It’s when we make assertions without declaring or implying the proper level of uncertainty that problems happen.

The result of the conversation was the dismissal of several assumptions.  When I first heard this guy speak, I assumed him to be an angry, misinformed, and subtly sexist person who denied the role that society and masculinity play in a culture of sexual abuse.  By the end of the conversation I had realized that I was completely wrong.  This was a thoughtful person who personally knew several rape victims, and was extremely dedicated to moral and practical consistency on opinions and debates relating to this topic.

And I will venture to say that I had taught him something.  At the end, we agreed that it was important to understand the context in which one criticizes the actions of a victim of something like rape.  I had spuriously accused him of doing more damage than good by bringing it up.  He made the very good point that none of the three of us (another person was also involved in the conversation) were in a position, had a desire, or were likely to spread dangerous misinformation.  So, with this in mind, I amended my statement, and said that I wanted to make sure he understood the ways in which one must modify such speech in a public forum.  This he agreed with.

So we both left the conversation with a heightened respect for the other (he had initially accused me of getting “violent” when I raised my voice following his assertion that beating up a sexual aggressor would help solve the problem), and an increased awareness of how difficult it is to engage in meaningful debate about these issues.

This is the kind of discussion we need more of.  Not to sound self-centered, but I think we exemplified the way people should be talking about these things.  Especially because both of us had spoken to Katie after the presentation and conveyed our gratitude and interest.

Make no mistake, these issues are incredibly hard to discuss.  Emotionally, logically, and morally.  But we owe it to the past and future victims to try.

I’ve been at Brown now since yesterday morning.  I’ve met SO many interesting people, and there are so many more to meet.  One of the biggest transitions has definitely been class size.  PVPA, all six grades, is less than a quarter the size of just the incoming freshman class here.  It’s SO BIG!  I’m coming to terms with the fact that I will not know everyone.  But I am making some good friends.

People are really friendly.  Especially when you remember that they’re all in the same boat as you; they’re nervous about meeting people as well.  If I suspend my judgment long enough to meet someone, I usually find them to be interesting and really engaging.  So it’s been a really rewarding experience so far.

Orientation programming continues essentially through Tuesday, when our first academic meetings with advisors occur.  I also have two job interviews on Tuesday and another on Thursday, all for on-campus jobs.  They are all really interesting positions, so I will be figuring that out pretty soon.

Things are coming together.  There’s certainly a lot to keep track of, but I feel pretty on top of it, especially with the help of the advisors and orientation committee, who’ve been awesome.

So far, a big thumbs up.  College is pretty fun.

I’ve just returned from a health care reform town hall meeting and rally in West Hartford, CT.  It was quite an experience.  After shouting into a megaphone for hours, holding signs, arguing with all sorts of people, and listening to peoples’ questions, I’ve learned a lot.  First of all, I’ve learned that people will try any tactic to distract you from the issues at hand.  I had people come up to me today, observing my various bits of Jew-apparel, and tell me that I should feel unsafe about the socialist direction the country was headed in, because socialism would lead to Naziism, etc.  And not only that, but that therefore I should be “pro-Israel” (a phrase I DESPISE), as it would be my last refuge when this country went down the tubes.  I say, when your last refuge is an introverted, outwardly violent, and discriminatory establishment, something is seriously wrong somewhere.

But I digress.

Sort of.

Because during that conversation, in which the gentleman I was discussing with said that we need to “break radical Islam”, he said something else that struck me: “You need to know who your enemies are.”  I responded by saying, “Sir, I don’t have enemies.  I have differences”.  But I’m not so sure that’s true.  In a way, my constant obsession with dialogue and discourse has blinded me to some important realities:

• The GOP, as a party, does not support health care reform.

The GOP is not interested in compromise.  They want to kill this bill (as many protesters today chanted) as a political tactic.  Now, I know this is nothing new in terms of political wrangling, but to pose as having legitimate opinions on reform is just deceitful.  Make no mistake: the GOP opposes reform.

• The GOP relies on misinformation and fear to keep its constituents behind it.

Today, I saw a lot of smart, educated people, who were very afraid.  I saw children younger than my youngest sister screaming hateful slogans.  What is it that makes these people want to live like this?  It’s the media’s willingness to pander to make money, and the GOP’s disgusting willingness to capitalize off of that.  Spreading fear of socialism is not constructive.  I had an entire crowd of people chanting “Get-A-Job” at me today, as I yelled through a megaphone about my MassHealth and my experiences with the system.  And when I talked to people afterwards, they said “You’re a Marxist”.  I said, “I’m not a Marxist, I believe in the free-market.  But you can’t turn peoples’ health into a profiteering racket”.  And then they said “What are you doing here?”  I was stunned.  I said “This is a free country.  All ideologies are welcome.”  The GOP should hold itself in higher esteem than to court the values of xenophobes and racists.  Being insular is not a political philosophy, it’s a moral shortcoming, and one that the GOP is exploiting for political gain.  That being true, I will call the GOP what it is: an immoral organization with no regard for real progress of any ideological flavor.  It is a self-serving organization, not one that exists for its constituents.

• There are people who will do anything to make you feel as though your opinions don’t matter.

I was decried as a Marxist, a Communist, and (along with my Jewish friend next to me), an anti-Semite.  These are accusations meant to take away from the substance of the argument.  This is not an ideological issue.  This is not a political issue.  If you believe that everyone has a right to health, there is no more debate except on how.  But that’s not what these people are debating.  When someone stood in front of me and said “I worked for my health insurance, and they should to”, I said, “So you are calling 47 million people slackers?  Are you prepared to stand by that?”.  They said, “Well, not all of them.”  So I said, “Then what about the ones who aren’t slackers?  How many are there?”  He couldn’t answer.  When faced with the reality of the issue, that millions of people who work just as hard, if not harder, than any of us, do not have the insurances we do because of disadvantages and fundamental inequalities that they have no control over, they can say nothing.  He tried to change the topic, he fear-mongered some more about my religion.  I told him I was quite comfortable with my existence as an American Jew.  He said, “Then why do people die trying to come to this country?”  I said, “Because there is a promise.  A promise of opportunity.  And the current health care system is a fundamental betrayal of that promise.”

I don’t mean to just write about my exploits, but I am coming to realize that not being able to negotiate is not a bad thing.  When you’re facing people who don’t want to talk, people who don’t respect progress or change, when people like Senator Enzi walk away, you have to cut your losses sooner or later.  This bill is going to happen.  And if we have to do it without the naysayers, so much the better.  Anyone who has something to contribute is welcome to join.  Welcome to talk to me or any other Democrat in the entire country any time.

But if you don’t have anything constructive to say, your time is over.  Fox News may be filming you, but they’re not making the policy decisions.

I’m extending a hand.  Will you take it?

I had intended to write last night about the first day of Institute, but was too tired.  Thus, this post is going to try to cover yesterday and some of today.

I started off the day yesterday, after breakfast, with text study.  There were only three people there, including the teacher, who it turned out lives in Northampton as well.  We looked at a parable attributed to the Baal Shem Tov.  In the parable, there is a fiddler, who plays a certain tune that the king likes very much.  He commands the fiddler to play it for him many times a day.  In order to prevent the fiddler from growing tired of the tune and playing it with less inspiration, the king brings a man off the street into the court every time the tune is played, someone who has never heard it before, so that the fiddler is always playing to a new audience, and feels inspired every time.  Eventually, the king realizes that he can’t keep pulling dudes off the street, so he is advised to blind the fiddler, so he won’t know if there’s a new person or not.  Thus ends the parable – rather inconclusive, but with a lot of food for thought.

The classical interpretation is that the king is God, and we are the fiddler.  The particular song represents prayer or worship.  The parable tells us to find new ways of keeping our prayer meaningful and applicable.  Although I don’t pray regularly, this was the part I liked.  When we get to the blindness part, there’s an issue.  What this seems to be saying is that we are blind to God’s plans in the macro sense.  I don’t like that idea.  To me, it engenders willful ignorance; the idea that we should assume we can’t understand the universe, so we shouldn’t try.  It implies that we should become more insular, caring only about our supposed personal relationship with God, and not about trying to discover anything else new.

That being said, it was an intriguing story, and a good way to start the day, particularly because it remained applicable to a lot of the other stuff I did, surprisingly enough.  In my morning baking class, we talked about the spiritual and philosophical implications of preparing food, and looked at some historicaly Jewish rabbinical writings on this topic.  Some of them dealt with what you do to make eating unique or worshipful.  For instance, there was a rabbi who said that if you are eating while walking, you should stop walking to eat.  If you are eating while standing, you should sit.  If you are sitting, you should recline.  And if you are reclining, you should wrap yourself in a prayer shawl and then eat.  The idea is that you need to distinguish what you’re doing; you need to take a break and step back.  I like this idea very much, especially considering the economic and social context of food in our society today.

My afternoon class began with an introduction to the historical definitions and derivation of Shemitah, the Jewish sabbath for the land that occurs every seventh year (depending on where you are and how you define it).  This class as well is going to talk a lot about the politics and economics of food.  Yesterday (and today as well) we worked on understanding the various perspectives on the practice; we haven’t really gotten to the meat of discussing how this practice should be applied today.  However, it fit in nicely with the theme of yesterday’s text study; how do you keep a regular practice (agriculture) relevant?  The agricultural justification for this law is somewhat questionable; you can farm land pretty constantly without depleting it (enriching it, in fact), if you do it properly.  At the very least, a mandatory year-long break every seven yeasr doesn’t provide the flexibility I imagine a farmer would need to keep the land healthy if there was reason to cease farming entirely.  But it does raise questions about how we should think of that practice to avoid abusing the land or ourselves in its context.  More on this later, I imagine.

One of my friends accompanied me to this morning’s text study.  There is a different teacher each day.  Yesterday’s teacher wasn’t there as a participant, but the other participant from yesterday was, plus one more.  We looked at the origin of Tu B’Av, which is rather grisly.  In outline form, the story takes place during the period of Judges.  The tribe of Benjamin commits a heinous crime against a traveler and his concubine, and in return all of the other tribes except one swear to never let their daughters marry Benjaminites.  They also go to war and kill a lot of the Benjaminites.  A ways down the line, they all realize that they’re about to entirely exterminate an entire tribe of Israel (which they surprisingly didn’t have any qualms about before), and they change course, working out an elaborate solution that involves abducting women to be brides (from a different tribe, one that had taken the oath, but since the women are taken without their father’s consent, it’s a loophole), but not before also killing a bunch of the tribe that didn’t take the original oath.  I guess the whole being married without permission part is the origin of the festival’s tradition of women going out to get guys; I’m not really that familiar with the current-day practice (by which I mean that I didn’t know it existed until yesterday).

Obviously, this is a rather troubling story.  The women leading the study pointed out that this story contains the first steps of Teshuvah (repentance).  This is true, but  it’s difficult to really give the repenters credit, because they haven’t admitted that what they did was wrong.  A participant in the text study insightfully pointed out that what they were really donig is approaching a series of problems.  They had the problem of the possible eradication of the tribe, so they dealt with it in a way that would create as few other problems as possible.  But along the way, they killed a bunch more people, and abducted a bunch of women.  In short, I don’t know enough about the holiday to say anything about how this might affect my perception of it as a modern practice, but its origin is pretty screwed up.  This is true of a lot of parts of Judaism.

Today in the baking class we made seven-species bread, which has turned out fabulous (as did yesterday’s oatmeal-maple bread).  Our teacher told us about his personal history with baking, and how it has affected his life as a rabbi and a person.  I’m looking forward to discussing a lot of food issues in this class as well.

I seem to have unintentionally picked two classes that are both about the economic, social, political, and spiritual implications of food.  I’m glad it’s worked out this way (it didn’t occur to me until yesterday), because this is something I’ve been getting increasingly interested in recently.  Food is a big problem facing our society.  I’ve heard it claimed that we can’t fix the health care system without fixing the food system.  That’s true to a certain extent; we could save a lot of money if we were just healther in the first place, and many of our current health problems can be traced to poor dietary habits as a culture.  But I do think that food change is going to be more of a grassroots effort than a legislative one.  Ultimately, the system will correct itself as oil prices rise (with the passage of Waxman-Markey, I hope), and as we run out of the stuff.  Michael Pollan puts it best: the corn industry is floating on oil.  That can’t last by definition, if nothing else.  The question is how many people will starve and be harmed before we get there.  And that’s an issue the government can’t fix; as long as there’s cheap food available, people will buy it.  It’s up to us to recognize the hidden costs of food.  Food is not cheap.  It’s probably one of the most labor-intensive commodities on the market.  We need to make the choice to pocket the full costs of food by buying locally, organically, and sustainably.

Programs like this one give me hope that that kind of change can be effected.  A lot of people come here to get educated and to educate, and there’s a lot of really important learning going on.  That kind of education is self-replicating.  Ignorance can only hold sway as long as no one is smart.  The nation is getting smarter.  We’re getting closer to real change, change we can, finally, believe in.

And here begins my first post from the NHC Summer Institute 2009!  So far, the program is off to a fabulous start.  I’m meeting a lot of new people, more than in past years, which is interesting.  I think my sort of circle of teen friends is making a more concerted effort to expand ourselves this year.  Needless to say, it’s been fabulous reconnecting with old friends.  It looks to be a terrific week, between my awesome classes, the facilitated dialogue re: “Israeli-Palestinian conflict”, and the general atmosphere of interesting people doing interesting things.

In other, extremely exciting news, I am going to start blogging at Jewschool!  A while back, I let Ben Murane know that I was interested in writing for them (I’ve been reading it for a while), and when I saw him today, he said they said yes.  I am uber-pumped to get started.  I don’t really know any details yet, but I am going to talk to a bunch of people who are part of the editorial comittee this week to find out more.  I suppose I’ll write more when I know more.

So, in summary, I am looking forward to a terrific week of various awesome things, which I will write more about as they occur.  For now, I will sleep.

The saga of my purchasing of the new iPhone 3G S began yesterday, when my mom asked why I hadn’t camped out for the new iPhone.  I explained to her the upgrade eligibility requirements, which resulted in my being unable to buy an iPhone at the unsubsidized price until December 12th.  She tried to find a way around it, and we spent a while on the phone, somewhat unsuccessfully.  The result was that I went to the Apple Store in Holyoke today to try to badger them into giving me a phone for the cheap price.  They couldn’t for any of the reasons we had thought of, but it turned out my father’s line (on the family plan) was eligible for an upgrade, so we bought the phone through that line, and then went to the AT&T store and had them switch it.  This took two full trips back and forth, but it got done, and the result is that I have the new iPhone, which is awesome.  I’m still working on a case for it, but the new features seem to be pretty great.

This evening I was in Natick seeing Cadence with two other members of 5-Alone.  The show was excellent.  They did a lot more jazz standard and barbershop type stuff than I was expecting.  It was all good, but some of it felt a little recursive after a while.  Except for the Cole Porter.  Cole Porter is really the best.  You just can’t beat him in terms of standards.  Fabulous.

It has been an extremely successful day.