At work, my life has already been focused on Passover for the last two weeks. I’m really proud of the free, downloadable Haggadah I wrote — please download a copy and tell your friends to do so too! I do sort of regret not finding a way to work this Will Finn song into it… after all, it describes the Passover experience of a Jewish family from the Boston area!

I do love this song, and it kills me how perfectly it captures the joy and pain, silliness and sadness that holidays with families can evoke.

Ever so often, I revisit my first blog (from 10 years ago). Today, I went hunting for my hamentashen recipe that I remembered posting in 2001. While poking around The Wayback Machine, I found this post, which I thought I would share again today because it made me chuckle:

Joy

I just posted the second half of my interview with Tom Jones (the creator of The Fantasticks, not the singer of “It’s Not Unusual”) on the Fynsworth Alley Stage Door. I can’t help but share with you a blooper that got edited out of the final version:

DL: I know the one thing we didn’t mention at all, and I don’t know what stage you are at with this… I know you’re doing your first show without Harvey [Schmidt], where you’re doing Henry and June?

TJ: Henry and June? What a great thought! That would be a fuck musical, right?

DL: Er, uh, w-w-what did I mean?

TJ: Harold and Maude. See, shows where you mind is. Freud was a great man, right?

I joke that the internet is littered with my cast-off blogs, but maybe that’s not such a joke. Anyway, since these days I’m fascinated with Tumblr, I launched itsdlevy.tumblr.com which I think I will mostly use for grown-up, professional-related type things. Yes, I know, there’s an irony in using the Tumblr platform for that.

Anyway, the first post is 5 Tips for Better Live-Tweeting. I’ll admit that the inspiration is one part trying to build my professional credibility in the social media world and one part wanting to have an easy link to send people when I want to scream at them “you’re doing it wrong!” Either way, I stand behind the content. If you’re someone who likes to tweet along with lectures or conferences, I hope you’ll find it helpful.

I know, I know, I haven’t posted anything of substance in this space in a couple of weeks. I’ve been enmeshed in some freelance editing work that’s taking up every free moment of computer time. I should be done in a couple of weeks, so hopefully I will return then.

Meanwhile, I’ve taken to keeping a Tumblr blog called Fuck Yeah Stephen Sondheim. It’s updated more or less twice daily, and mostly consists of videos and audio clips of fantastic performances of Sondheim. Occasionally, they are fantastically bad, but for the most part, these aren’t the obvious clips that you’ve seen a million times.

Of course, Tumblr is down as I’m posting this, so bookmark the site and hopefully it will be back soon. And then, not too long after, hopefully I’ll be back here with more substantive things to say.

In the meantime, can I interest you in a high school marching band performing selections from Sunday in the Park With George?

Today is the 12th annual international Transgender Day of Remembrance. I am lucky to know several transgender people in my life, some of whom I count among my dearest friends. I am even luckier that they don’t number among those lost to violence. The rates of violence against transgender people are so disgustingly high, and worse if you factor in the number of transgender people lost to suicide — a direct result of the hateful atmosphere towards transgender people in this country.

I’ve already written about how and why I try to be an ally to transgender people. I’m sure I don’t get it right all the time, and I’m lucky to have transgender friends who will let me know when I screw up and give me suggestions of how to be better.

Two things I know I can do are to be vocal, reminding those who don’t come into regular contact with transgender people that a) they exist and b) we’ve got a lot of work to do to make the world a safer place for them; and show up at events like tonight’s Transgender Day of Remembrance speakout and vigil at The Cathedral Church of St. Paul on Boston Common.

I first attended this event a few years ago, when I realized that so many transgender activists fight for gay rights that don’t necessarily benefit them, the least I could do was show up on days that are important to their causes. I was blown away by the speakers, the songs, the poignant mix of sadness and hope, and the tremendous fellowship among a mix of friends and strangers united by a cause. Since the first TDOR event I attended, the Boston vigil has grown in size — I can’t believe that 350 people have RSVP’ed yes on Facebook! But there’s still lots of work to be done.

There are events happening all over the globe this week. Check out the Transgender Day of Remembrance website to find out what’s happening in your community. Lend your voice in support, show up to be counted, and while you’re at it, write your legislators, clergy, school administrators, and others in power and ask them what they’re doing to make your community a safer place for all its members.

What did you want to be when you grew up?

When I was in the first grade, I had a really spectacular teacher named Mary Caiza. She exemplified everything you could ever want in a teacher. She was kind and caring and made every student feel like a superstar. She encouraged creativity and imagination, and modeled these traits by telling us stories of her playful dogs (named Jack and Jill) and bringing in photographs of her neighbor’s duck-shaped mailbox that changed outfits as often as Barbie.

One day, she gave us an assignment to write and illustrate a poem. I still remember my first-grade thought process. “Everyone else is going to write a rhyming poem, but I know that poems don’t have to rhyme. I’ll write a poem that doesn’t rhyme so that mine will stand out. I don’t know what to write a poem about, but I really like Where the Sidewalk Ends, so maybe I can rip that off.” Please note, I was envisioning pastiche, not plagiarism.

So I wrote a poem called “Where the Sea Ends” (oh, the cleverness of me!), and I drew a beach with some seagulls, and handed it in. I (thankfully) can’t remember the actual content of the poem (although I do still have it, in a box that will get unpacked as soon as I remember to borrow my parents’ scanner so I can preserve its contents). But I do remember Mrs. Caiza’s reaction. She enthused about my effort and encouraged me to keep writing. It was that moment that I decided I wanted to grow up to be a writer.

Of course, being me, I wouldn’t be happy unless I grew up to eclipse Shakespeare. In fact, my Harvard application essay was about this very notion. If you’re going to do something, why not aim to be the best at it?

When I was in high school, I got very involved in Judaism via USY, the youth group of the Conservative Movement which, contrary to its name, is one of the liberal streams of Judaism. My time as a USY leader shaped the man I grew up to be, probably more than any other experience in my youth. And one thing became clear to me as a teenager: when I grew up, I wanted to be an involved Jewish layperson. But I definitely did not want to be a Jewish communal professional.

Oops.

I’m now in my ninth year of full-time Jewish professional work. By and large, I have no regrets. I am lucky to do meaningful work, for nonprofit organizations that I can wholeheartedly support — and I do so not only with my efforts, but also with my philanthropic dollars.

But there are three factors in my teenage pledge that linger. Jewish communal professionals tend to work themselves to the bone, largely because we care passionately about the work we do. As a teenager, I looked at some of my role models and mentors who devoted themselves to the community at the expense of having successful family lives, and I feared that might happen to me. I’m 32 and single and still worry about that, although this year proved to me that I can make room for a relationship if I concentrate on making it a priority. Given my personality and my neuroses, I don’t know that either my tendency to workaholism (that is, my addiction to workahol) or my relationship-avoidance (which I hope I’ve conquered) would have played out any differently in another line of work.

My second fear is that I wouldn’t make room for the writing I want to be doing. That’s been true. I’ve got a hard drive full of abandoned drafts, enough blog posts floating out in the ether to fill several books (if only my particular brand of solipsism could sell!), but no discipline to sit down and write every day. And definitely no discipline to sit down and write with purpose every day. This blog is my latest attempt to at least get in the habit of making time to write, even if it’s not the kind of writing I most want to do. You can see how successful that’s been.

My third fear is that the ideas of what it means to be a Jewish leader instilled in me back in USY have stifled my creativity. USY was (and is) very big on the idea of being a דוגמה (dugmah), an example. To lead one’s peers, to be a leader in the Jewish community meant being more observant of Judaism and being better behaved than everyone else. It took me about a decade to untangle myself from the idea that being “more observant” meant the observance of the particular mitzvot (religious rules) that USY expected of its youth leaders. I admit, I still don’t understand rabbis who love social justice more than Shabbat, but I understand that there’s room for that kind of leader as well. But I think I’m still stuck within a paradigm that says (at least in my neuroses) that visible Jewish leaders need to be well-behaved.

This isn’t just a USY thing. I’m sure many Jews who grew up in largely non-Jewish communities learned at some point that they represented “The Jews” to everyone at school, work, or elsewhere. To be a Jewish leader, this gets extended to representing “The Jews” to Jews as well. Many non-Orthodox Jews (and, who knows, probably Orthodox Jews as well) expect their leaders to follow Judaism in ways they never would want to follow for themselves. This is particularly true of clergy — many Conservative congregations don’t have a single congregant who keeps kosher or observes Shabbat, but those congregations would freak out if they saw their rabbi at the McDonald’s drive thru on a Saturday afternoon. But (in my head, and possibly only in my head), I apply this to myself as well.

It’s gotten better since I stopped working with kids. I feel a great responsibility to be a good role model to kids, in part because I benefited from some fantastic role models myself. And I also feel great that I’ve been able to be an unexpected role model to kids in various ways, like the years I had bright green hair under my yarmulke (which I wore daily for the last two years of high school and the first two years of college). It’s very important to me that I’ve been able to model being an openly gay man involved in Jewish community. But…

Well, I’ve always been something of a rebel. The green hair only scratched the surface. Had I not been involved in Jewish community, had I not had this “what would everyone else think” voice in my head, what kind of radical might I have been? I toyed with publishing zines in high school, with performance art in college. I’ve performed in drag and like to shock people into thinking about familiar subjects in new ways.

But how shocking can I be as a public leader in my community? I started Fuck Yeah Stephen Sondheim and connected it to my Facebook and Twitter pages. Does that cross the line of what I should be presenting to professional contacts, to former students? I don’t think the word “fuck” is so shocking any more… but we all like to pretend it is.

Earlier this week, Y-Love posted a link on Facebook to a Moment Magazine blog post called Now THAT’S Offensive! Politically Incorrect Suggestions for Religious Blogs. Naturally, I was inspired to immediately create one of the suggestions, Fuck Yeah Torah Portion. There’s not much there yet. But it’s a great idea, in the model of Punk Torah, to break down some of the barriers that keep people from Torah, which is, after all, pretty fucking awesome.

The reaction to this on my Facebook page ranged from a Conservative rabbi admiring the idea but admitting to not being able to type the word fuck to an Orthodox friend asking me to take it down because it’s נבל פב (nivel peh, or bad language). Of course, Y-Love, who is also Orthodox, called the instant creation of the site an “awesome attack,” so, hooray for diversity.

Now, I don’t believe there’s a problem with using the word Fuck to promote Torah, and I responded to my friend’s objections by quoting the book of Proverbs at him. In Hebrew. From memory. (Go go gadget master’s degree!) See, our people have a tradition of favoring connection to text over language. Proverbs says we must educate each person על פי דרכו, in his own way. Maimonides wrote about the permissibility of reciting שמע (Shema, a credo recited three times daily by observant Jews) in the vernacular. And so on. And I believe that one man’s profanity is another man’s (or generation’s) vernacular. (And let me here acknowledge Punk Torah for already doing this, although not necessarily with the profanity.

But clearly the one negative comment got under my skin, because a couple days later I’m still thinking about this. How much of an obligation to good behavior do I have? If I want to have a shadow career as an edgy performance artist, a foul-mouthed teacher of Torah, a radical leftist political organizer, or a writer of controversial material… when does that start to rub up against the role I play in the community, the role that pays my bills?

If I had it to over again, would I try my hand at being the performance artist / writer / organizer by day and Jewish communitarian at night instead? Maybe. But can I ever imagine being the kind of person who can really and truly push boundaries and run roughshod over taboos without looking over his shoulder to wonder what his mother / teacher / community thinks? I don’t know.

I am pro-actively redacting the post I might write related to this song and how I’m feeling, but please enjoy the incredible Juliet Prowse performing the hell out of one of my favorite songs from Follies.

Update! I am so enthused by this video, I went searching for a Fuck Yeah Stephen Sondheim Tumblr and found that one did not exist.

It does now. Fuck Yeah Stephen Sondheim will be updated daily. Feel free to submit your favorite videos, audio clips, Sondheim quotes, or pictures via the submit page on that site.

You can tell how excited/nervous I am for a date by how much I clean my apartment before the date happens. This is one of those things I do regardless of whether or not I have any expectation that the date will actually see my apartment. It’s a productive way to channel my nervous energy. And if it just so happens that he sees the inside of my apartment, he should see it at its best, right?

Tonight, my apartment is in worse shape than usual, because I am in the middle of the Great Unboxing. I’ve finally decided to remove all my CDs (approximately… 3000?) and DVDs (about 600) from their boxes and store them in much more space-efficient binders. When this project is done, the result will be a glorious clutter-free house. But since I can’t quite part with all the original packaging, my living room is currently stacked with cardboard boxes holding the empty cases, plus more boxes from Amazon that brought the binders to me in the first place. (I’m only about 40% through this project. It is, needless to say, massive.)

But I’ve stacked the boxes best I can so my little Roomba can do his thing in the living room. (His name is Jacob, after the houseboy in La Cafe Aux Folles.) I’ve finally gone through that pile of mail and recycled most of it. I emptied the trash cans. Swept the bathroom. Scrubbed the toilet. Made my bed. Tidied up the paperwork on the dining room table, and attempted to do the same on the kitchen island.

Then I get a text message. He’s stuck in traffic. No worries, I reply. I was just going to walk over to the restaurant, I can delay my departure. He texts back confused – the only address he has is my apartment.

Shit. He’s coming here. And suddenly I’m scrubbing the stovetop and washing any dishes remaining in the sink. I sure hope this one’s worth it.

I’ve been busy with a million things lately, mostly good. Work is busy. The freelance stuff I’m doing keeps me busy. I’ve put in a lot of hours at Keshet events and meetings. Somehow I’ve managed to have a social life on top of that. And I picked up a new volunteer commitment, serving on the Diversity Council for The Theater Offensive, a fantastic GLBT theater company in Boston that is looking to bring youth (aged 14-22) into leadership positions throughout their lay (and possibly professional?) structure.

Tomorrow I am guest-teaching a class at Prozdor, my first time back since leaving my full-time job there this past June. My friend Stacey teaches a class on “Hot Topics in Judaism,” and she asked me to come be the guest homosexual for the class. I agreed, but said that the topic couldn’t be “homosexuality.”

You see, for these kids — mostly (but not entirely) liberal, suburban, white, middle-class Jews — homosexuality isn’t a hot topic. It’s just an element of the world they live in. They might have some sense that traditional Jewish law has something to say about the buttsex, but the majority of these kids don’t live their lives by traditional Jewish law anyway.

So I told Stacey we had to settle on a specific hot topic that involves gay people in Jewish life, so we decided to focus on the brouhaha over The New Jersey Jewish Standard caused when it printed a same-sex wedding announcement and then subsequently printed an apology for causing pain to the Orthodox community by doing so.

I’m a little curious if I will get into any trouble, mostly because I can’t present the two sides to this story as being valid. I don’t believe the rabbis who caused a stink with The Standard did so in good faith, and the “hot topic” really at play here is one of integrity in a pluralistic community. But hell, I don’t work for the school any more, so if anyone wants to complain that I’m indoctrinating their kids, I won’t have to be the one to take the phone call.

I have sleep apnea. Sleep apnea is a condition that prevents your air passages from staying open on their own while you sleep. For most people, your body deals with this situation by waking you up every time the passage collapses on itself, which in my case was close to 60 times a minute (that’s once a second!) when I try to sleep unassisted. When you wake up that often, you don’t necessarily feel conscious, but when you wake up “for real” in the morning, you feel as if you haven’t slept at all because, well, you haven’t.

There are generally two reasons why someone develops sleep apnea. Either they are massively obese — viewers of The Biggest Loser are familiar with the condition because it’s frequently listed among the reasons why being fat makes the contestants miserable — or their throats are just made that way. Sadly, I fall into the latter category. Each time I see my doctor, she begins a lecture about how I could lose a few pounds (and I know I could), but she stops herself short once she points her microscope at my throat, realizing that no matter what my weight, sleep apnea is my lot.

The good news is that sleep apnea is treatable. The bad news is that a) it’s not curable and b) the treatment is less than ideal. The treatment involves sleeping with a device that is essentially the bastard child of an air compressor and a humidifier, attached to my face via a mask that makes me look Darth Vader doing his best Hannibal Lechter impression. Makes for really sexy overnight dates, let me tell you. Sleeping with the mask on aslo means I wake up with marks on my face from the straps, and I have to be extra conscious of my skin care regimen lest I break out, which I do a lot.

[Mom, this is the part where you might want to stop reading.]

So why write about it here? Well, for one thing, had I not read of others experiences with sleep apnea on their blogs, I probably would never have connected my poor moods and lack of energy with the condition six years ago when I asked my doctor to order a sleep study for me. And, well, being back on the dating market, I haven’t quite figured out how/when to bring this up with new beaux. So far I haven’t schlepped the sleeping machine (which is about the size of a small toaster oven) to anyone’s house, but I also haven’t had a whole lot of overnight dates yet and one night without sleep is manageable. (And I haven’t brought any dates home, where at least the machine sitting next to my bed potentially opens up the conversation.)

One of the many things that was great about my previous relationship was that a) he was familiar with the whole sleep apnea deal because his dad had it and b) he made me feel really comfortable about the whole thing. Generally, there are enough insecurities whirling around the whole experience of going to bed with a new person, adding the whole “I need a machine to help me sleep and please don’t look at me because I hate the way I look while using it” thing isn’t super fun. So I’m a little curious how others out there in internet-land deal with this. I have no idea if there are any other sleep-apnea-sufferers even reading this thing, but I’m hoping that the beauty of tagging-and-twitter might help get this in front of some helpful eyes.

Oh my lord, am I suddenly looking to the internet for group therapy? Gentlemen, this is yet one more example of why I am anxious to get myself back into a long-term relationship. I appreciate the number of men who have wanted to go on dates with me, (and I’m not trying to brag when I say it has been somewhat staggering), but I get no joy out of the million little insecurities that get activated on every first date, every first kiss, every first everything else. Are there really people out there who enjoy this sort of thing?