Purim Recap

1.  I kept to my Purim tradition of wearing pajamas and bathrobe throughout the holiday (a la Vincent "The Chin" Gigante of Greenwich Village fame).  This has provided much-needed streamlining of transitions from standing to sleeping, and from sleeping to standing.  I have to say there is something liberating about being able to wake up and go to shul on Purim morning in the same comfortable togs worn to the previous night's bacchanalia 'Tish'.

2.  Family costumes were as follows:

• Zahava wore a 'Punjabi Suit' (Salwar kameez) I brought back for her from one of my business trips to India.  Yes, she too was essentially wearing pajamas throughout the day.
• Ariella was a WWII-era WAC.  My mother (who, according to my calculations, was but an infant during that conflict) pronounced her both adorabe and historically accurate.
• Gilad was a ventriloquist dummy (you know he took some ribbing about this), but refused to sit on my lap in shul.
• Yonah was a lion (and roared fiercely at anyone who came within range of his terrible claws and teeth!)
• Jordan was a faithful black dog, reminiscent of the classic Martha's Vineyard franchise mascot.
• Lulu copied Jordan's costume idea, but kept breaking character to bark at real and imaginary visitors, and to chase her tail.

Pictures to be posted later (hopefully... check back in the afternoon), but don't bother looking for Zahava or Gilad.  Zahava is notoriously camera-shy, and Gilad seems to have had some sort of an allergic reaction to the face make-up his sister put on him and didn't stay in costume long enough to be photographed.

3.  My parents joined us for the traditional Purim Seudah (meal), and for desert we seem to have eaten the contents of all 167 Mishloach Manot (food gift baskets) we received over the holiday.  I feel like one of those AA members who has to walk into a meeting, place his 5 year pin on the table and admit "I've been sober since, um, [looks at watch] 9 o'clock this morning". [~hangs head~]

4.  While my downtrodden Palestinian friend Jameel was nice enough to call and wish us a happy Purim, sadly he seems to have had some trouble negotiating the countless humiliating checkpoints between his family's hovel and my community, because the much-anticipated waffles never arrived.  Thankfully I was able to subsist on the roughly 7000 calories located in each of the above-mentioned gift baskets.