Much Ado About Jessie Kaplan

by Paula Marantz Cohen

  Then the doorbell rang.

  “Oh my God!” said Carla, “I completely forgot that the bar mitzvah entertainment motivator was coming over tonight.”

  “Why do we need an entertainment motivator?” asked Mark irritably. “Can’t we just hire a deejay and leave it at that? How complicated could it be to play a few records?”

  “CDs,” corrected Carla. “From what I hear, it’s not so simple. Jill Rosenberg said it’s important to have someone who knows what the kids like and can make the party work.”

  “We already have a band,” objected Mark, who took a certain pride in having discovered that group after hearing them on the radio while driving home from work several months earlier. The band had been featured on the public radio station WHYY for its “authentic klezmer music,” and Mark had been impressed by how classy they sounded.

  Carla hadn’t known quite what to make of the idea of a klezmer band. She was used to bar mitzvahs in which the band was of the modified Benny Goodman variety, where women in low-cut gowns and men in combovers sang old standards, then snapped their fingers as they segued into something more hip (i.e., songs from the 1980s). But she was reluctant to countermand Mark on the subject. He had taken very little interest in planning the bat mitzvah up until now, and it didn’t seem wise to thwart his enthusiasm.

  Discussing the issue with her friend Jill, however, had put things in perspective. “Classy is all well and good,” said Jill, shaking her head at Carla when she was told about Mark’s decision, “but classy can be the kiss of death at a bar mitzvah. You’re going to have to hire an entertainment motivator with some shpilkus to counteract that klezmer,” she noted, as if she had devised a chemical antidote to the possible toxicity of the band.

  Jill had regaled Carla with stories of bar mitzvahs in which everyone sat glumly at their tables, refusing to dance. “Nowadays, people won’t get up without some motivation,” she explained. “They’re used to sitting in front of the TV. You need to set a fire under them. That’s the business of the entertainment motivator. He forces people to have a good time.”

  Carla opened the front door now, curious to see what an entertainment motivator looked like. A man of indeterminate age in a form-fitting shirt and leather pants bounded into the room. He was carrying a large suitcase and exuded an enormous amount of energy. Soupy Sales, the popular 1960s TV/radio personality, had perhaps had something of the same energetic style.

  “I’m Griffin,” said the man, pumping Carla and Mark’s hands. He handed them a card with Griffin written on it in gothic script and a picture of a gold dragon next to the name. “I’m due at the Rothsteins’ at nine, so I’ll make this short and sweet.” He snapped open the suitcase. “Let me show you some of the exciting stuff we have for you. We tailor the affair to your specifications, of course.” He gave a swift glance at the room, as if trying to assess their net worth, and with a quick motion extracted a tape from the suitcase and looked around for a VCR. Apparently, most families had VCRs within striking distance of the front door, and he seemed surprised when Carla explained that theirs was upstairs.

  Everyone traipsed upstairs, where Griffin popped the tape into the VCR. A scene of violent festivity immediately appeared on the screen. Two young women in short-shorts, striped vests, and high boots, who looked like extras in a Bob Fosse musical, were dancing wildly in front of a vast throng. Standing behind them on a platform with a microphone, Griffin was directing “Grandma” to “shake her booty” as the camera panned to the image of a woman in her eighties and a young man in a bandanna, skin-tight pants, and a cut-off T-shirt, who had taken her by the hand. “Let’s go, Grandma Sadie!” said Griffin into the microphone, while the vast throng could be heard egging her on as she shimmied opposite the young man in the T-shirt.

  “I’m showing you here one of our more popular packages,” explained Griffin soberly (the outlandish images transpiring on the screen might have been a funeral procession given his tone of voice). “We have three entertainment facilitators, as you can see—two female, one male, not including yours truly. We try for very high energy and getting everyone involved. That’s the key to a successful bar mitzvah. You don’t want Cousin Edgar, the sourpuss, to stand off to the side and look miserable. That can throw the whole party off.” Griffin spoke as though he had conducted an extensive study of the successful bar mitzvah and these were his scientific findings.

  The tape now panned to one of the female entertainment facilitators as she grabbed a middle-aged man with a dazed expression and launched into a provocative bump and grind. “Come on, Dad, show us your stuff!” cried Griffin on the tape to the apparently mortified father of the bar mitzvah boy, as the crowd clapped rhythmically in time to the gyrations of the female entertainment facilitator. The camera panned to the other female entertainment facilitator, who was doing something of the same thing with a pimply youth in braces who was standing stock-still and staring straight ahead into her cleavage. “Okay, Sammy, show Dad how it’s done,” instructed Griffin. The bar mitzvah boy remained immobilized as the young woman in short-shorts bumped up against him.

  “Don’t you have something a bit more toned down?” asked Mark, taken aback by the images on the screen.

  “I’m showing you the package that my more low-key customers go for,” said Griffin in a miffed tone. “This is my classiest—and I should add, most economical—package. Many families tend to like things a bit more flashy: five entertainment facilitators, cowboy theme, strobe lights, that sort of thing. But I could tell when I met you that you weren’t the flashy types, which is why I showed you this package.”

  “It still seems a bit—much,” said Mark, imagining himself the object of the bump and grind.

  “Well, we could go with our two-facilitator package,” said Griffin doubtfully. Obviously, this was slumming, but his tone implied that he was prepared to give the customer what he wanted—up to a point. “I don’t have a tape of that, I’m afraid, but you can imagine that it would be less of everything.”

  “Less of everything sounds great,” said Carla hastily. She could tell that Mark was on the verge of reneging on the whole thing, which would throw the bat mitzvah into disarray. Stephanie, who had gone to at least ten bar mitzvahs by now and was, in the manner of a teenager, determined to have everything the same as her friends, expected a deejay, and it would be close to impossible to book anyone halfway decent at this late date.

  Carla was sensitive to the need to meet Stephanie’s expectations regarding the deejay, since she was still suffering the aftereffects of a fight they had had the week before. A pitched battle had occurred when Stephanie insisted that she wanted her party to have a day-at-the-spa theme. Her friend Lisa’s bat mitzvah had had this theme, which featured “stations” for massages, facials, manicures, and so forth.

  Carla had been outraged by the idea. “The theme of your bat mitzvah is your initiation into the faith of your ancestors,” she had lectured severely. “Any other theme would be both vulgar and sacrilegious.”

  Stephanie, riled more by her mother’s tone of voice than by her refusal to support the spa theme, accused Carla of being stupid, mean, and living under a rock (presumably those who did not live under rocks embraced bat mitzvah spa themes as the way of the world).

  Thankfully, Jessie had stepped in at a crucial moment and calmed the storm. She had mentioned, in a casual sort of way, that curling irons and nail polish might embarrass some of the male guests. Stephanie’s grandfather, she recalled, had been petrified by the beauty parlor, and it would be a shame to scare the boys, especially at this fragile, impressionable age. Stephanie had taken these comments to heart and dropped all lobbying for the spa theme—though she had continued to bear a grudge against her mother for days afterward. Remembering this, Carla now felt averse to weathering more of her daughter’s wrath if the deejay fell through.

  “We’ll go with the two-person package,” asserted Carla. “I’m sure it will be fine.”

  “If that’s w
hat you want,” said Griffin grudgingly. “I assume you’ll follow the standard order of events.”

  “Standard order?” asked Carla. She could tell that Griffin was beginning to view them as a remedial case, woefully ignorant of bar mitzvah etiquette. He glanced at his watch, perhaps wondering if he was wasting his time.

  “The standard order,” he explained, with a note of exasperation, ticking the items off with crisp alacrity, “is the hora first to get them up and about; then the motzi, the blessing, with Grandpa and maybe Dad; then the presentation of the family, with music picked out to match each personality; then the first dance—“Sunrise, Sunset” if it’s father-daughter, which in your case it is; then some old standards to get the fogies on their feet, and then the contemporary stuff—Britney, Justin, Christina—so the kids can have a good time.” He seemed to have recited this fearsome litany without taking a breath, and continued now, filling in the fine points. “We put the theme pieces in there, of course: You can do requests for the candle-lighting so that, say, Cousin Ruth, who likes Sting, or Uncle Robert, the Dead Head, gets their song when they come up to a light a candle.”

  “That sounds fine,” said Carla, feeling dizzy. “We’ll give you a list of what the family likes.”

  “Okay, then,” said Griffin, “so all we have to do now is review the favors and prizes and we’re set.” He gave them a sidelong glance, as if daring them to question him on this point, then took out some samples from his valise. “The CD prize”—he held up a CD imprinted with the Griffin logo—“very big right now. The kids like to have personalized mixes—we can do that to your specifications, for a modest additional fee. We also have the inflatable favors which are very big.” He produced a brightly colored laminated sheet. “Blow-up guitars, saxophones, trumpets, even a full set of inflatable drums—great at the beach. Then there’s the basic filler: glitter sticks, hula hoops, top hats, sunglasses, leis—”

  “Do we really need to have any of this stuff?” asked Mark. “Isn’t it enough that the kids are having a great party?”

  Griffin paused for a moment and looked over at Mark as though he were crazy. “Where have you been, man? Kids aren’t satisfied anymore unless they have this stuff. Sure, they get thrown out the next day, but it’s the energy, the sense of things happening that’s important. If you don’t do it, they’re going to ask your daughter, ‘Where are the prizes, where are the favors?’ What’s she going to say—‘My folks were too cheap to have them’?”

  Mark was silent.

  “A few favors,” said Carla. “Maybe one or two.”

  “One or two? Better have nothing,” said Griffin. Then, waving his hand as if to say he’d have to take things into his own hands, he added, “I’d recommend our three-star package: five favors, two CD prizes—that’s the one for those, like you, that don’t like to be flashy.”

  “Sounds fine,” said Carla, not looking at Mark. “We’ll do the three-star package then.”

  “That settles it,” said Griffin. “We have a two-entertainment-facilitator presentation and a three-star prize-and-favor package. Very elegant and low-key.”

  “And the cost?” asked Mark. “What does that combination run to?”

  “That’s, let’s see, three thousand ballpark,” said Griffin, checking through a variety of Xeroxed sheets in the valise. “The CD prices fluctuate, as do the favors. So it’s give or take a few hundred. I’ll have the exact estimate for you a few weeks before the affair.”

  “Three thousand dollars,” said Mark. “I had no idea …”

  “Well, perhaps you’ve got the wrong person,” said Griffin, his good cheer beginning to evaporate. He was someone who clearly did not like to nickel-and-dime, and Mark, for whom questions of cost were the bane of his existence as a physician, was struck by the fact that the entertainment motivator seemed far more able to call the shots than he could as a physician with ten years of practice under his belt.

  “I’m afraid anything less would compromise my standards,” said Griffin in a huffy tone. “You see, I have a reputation to maintain. I’m considered the best deejay in the Delaware Valley—chosen by Philadelphia magazine.” He extracted another Xeroxed sheet to this effect from the recesses of the valise. “If you want something second-rate, I suggest you go elsewhere.”

  “No, no,” said Carla, frightened that he would throw them over and they would be left without a deejay three months before the bat mitzvah—akin to being left on Thanksgiving without a turkey. “I’m sure that the package you suggest will be just fine.” She darted Mark a warning look. “Three thousand dollars seems reasonable.”

  “Then that’s settled. I’ll draft the contract and have it in to you in a jiffy,” said Griffin, snapping the suitcase shut and regaining his ebullient mood. “You have the bat mitzvah girl draw up a list of her favorite songs. Don’t you worry, you won’t regret it; everyone will have a blast. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to the Rothsteins. They’re going for a big blow-out. Ten entertainment facilitators and a full reenactment of the highlights from three Broadway shows: A Chorus Line, Chicago, and 42nd Street—not to mention the full roster of favors, including tag bracelets from Tiffany’s for the young ladies and money clips for the young men. But that’s high-end, top-of-the-line stuff—he’s in sporting goods.” Doctors were obviously very low on the totem pole with bar mitzvah motivators these days. “But each event,” he qualified, “is special, no matter what the size. You’re going to love every minute of it, believe me.”

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Hal sat WITH JESSIE IN A CORNER BOOTH OF PONZIO’S, A Cherry Hill diner where everyone in the area, from mob bosses to politicians to members of the Hadassah Sisterhood, met for lunch. Ponzio’s was located at the epicenter of Cherry Hill on the Ellisburg Circle. The Circle itself had long disappeared, redesigned to allow for less treacherous traversing, but the name remained out of sentimental affection for that deadly South Jersey traffic pattern.

  Hal arranged the lunch without Carla’s knowledge, calling at a time during midday when he figured Jessie would be alone. He knew that if Carla answered she would try to dissuade him from talking with her mother. Not that he didn’t think that Jessie would tell her daughters about their appointment. He was in fact expecting an annoyed call from Carla or an angrier one from Margot complaining that it was a bad idea to encourage their mother in her delusions. He had already prepared a response to them: “Your mother is a grown person,” he heard himself saying. “Okay, she’s not exactly of sound mind, but she’s not helpless or incoherent either. I just want to get the full story.” Truth be told, he was hoping that Margot, in particular, would call; he would have liked to hear her voice.

  But no call had come. This led Hal to believe that Jessie, aware of her daughters’ views, had not mentioned anything about the meeting—a degree of foresight that led him to the conclusion that, as with Hamlet, “Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t.”

  It happened that on Tuesdays and Thursdays Carla helped Mark in the office, not only with the HMO paperwork but with the media calls that were now pouring in as a result of his Courier Post column and Action News appearance. (Yvette, the Drexel co-op student, had to go back to school, so Carla had taken over the outreach effort.)

  This left Jessie on her own. Usually, when she wasn’t engaged in household chores like cooking and cleaning, she liked to cruise the malls and do some serious bargain shopping—and Cherry Hill is a mecca for the bargain hunter. Although most of the area’s residents make a comfortable living, they see buying at full price as a kind of moral backsliding, like sleeping past noon or eating a whole container of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream. It happens, but one feels bad about it afterward.

  Jessie was no exception in this regard. She greatly appreciated the cornucopia of discount stores and factory outlets. She took pains to comparative shop, even among the various bargain stores themselves, and felt that to discover a pillow that was two dollars cheaper at Marshalls than at T. J. Maxx was an
achievement to be proud of. Her skills as a bargain hunter were all part of the package that Milt Kaplan had found so captivating: a beautiful woman who cooked and cleaned like a dream, and who also shopped so as to save her husband money. Such a thing was unheard of—“as a rare as a snowstorm in July,” Milt liked to say, “but there’s my Jessie, making snowballs in a sundress.”

  In short, Jessie’s shopping habits meant that if Carla called from Mark’s office and found that no one was home, she would assume that her mother was traipsing through the malls, looking for markdowns. She would have no reason to suspect a more covert errand.

  After Hal greeted Jessie in the reception area of Ponzio’s, he asked the hostess to seat them in one of the smaller rooms in the back. They were led to the Barclay Room, where, though it was lunchtime and the place was buzzing, they could still find a relatively quiet spot in the corner. Ponzio’s was spacious enough that privacy was possible, even though everyone went there.

  The diner was also noteworthy for its staff of competent, mature waitresses—a far cry from the inept high-school girls who staffed Friendly’s. Ponzio waitresses were always on hand, lounging near the coffee urns, prepared to saunter over at the slightest gesture and call you “sweetie” or “hon.” Hal had barely crooked a finger when one appeared at his elbow.

  Jessie ordered the chopped Greek salad, a Ponzio’s specialty, and Hal, a Reuben sandwich. After scratching a few marks on a pad, the waitress sashayed off, only to sashay back, a few minutes later, with their order. The rapidity of service at Ponzio’s was another mystery. Given the size of the place and the extent of the menu, no one could fathom how the food could be prepared so quickly.