Before Riverdance, Before Green Bagels...

So there’s now only hours left in which to blog about St. Patrick’s Day.   If you’ve read this blog before (or even just the title) you already know that Michael Bloomberg and I are about equally Irish (well actually him a bit more, since I’m sure he attends the parade, he’s probably been to Ireland at least once, and I think he wears those white cableknit sweaters even on other days).

Of course I usually try to wear some green on St. Patrick’s Day and always did when I was a kid, simply because it was fun to match everyone else in school and on the street. Here was harmless conformity that didn’t threaten or conflict with my Jewish identity; it was in fact a perfect fit with my New York Cityness, in my outer-borough way, and my parents’ before me.  Weren’t our neighbors, on the other side of the wall that separates row houses in Queens, born-in-Ireland Irish? Mrs. Vardi even had a brogue.  Even our teachers were more Irish than anything else, in those years before the wave of graduating Jewish ed majors crested. Our principal was a Miss Calahan.  For third grade, Mrs. Mulhern.

Pupils and teachers, Irish and not, all held some kind of St. Patrick’s Day observance every year. So on this particular March 17 of the sixties, here’s me, six years old, sitting with my similarly green-clad schoolmates in the auditorium of PS 102 Queens, where the teacher at the piano is playing Irish music.  There’s a nice, deep, wood-paneled proscenium stage in front and framed prints of famous paintings on the walls; paintings, like Gainsborough’s Blue Boy and  Seurat’s La Grande Jatte,  that I will recognize for the rest of my life as those I first met in PS 102. Of course there’s an American flag in one corner and I think the flag of New York City, the one with the windmill and beaver, in the other.

That day some teacher asked -- I forget who -- if anyone knew how to dance an Irish jig. I know this was loooong before Riverdance.  I think it was long before the Irish dancing trend hit regular neighborhood kids. Far as I know, none of my friends took Irish dancing lessons, and while I remember the strange sight of miniature bridal gowns (or so they looked to me) on seven-year olds in the spring, I never saw any kids (and certainly not the O’Hares on my block) sporting any of those $500-and-up Irish dancing costumes kids get today with the stiff, short flared skirts and the elaborate piping.

But at some point in my six years to that point, I must’ve seen some Irish people, or non-Irish people, dancing jigs. It looked to me like a simple matter of raising your knee and kicking or toe-stepping your foot at three corners of an imaginary square. So I raised my hand.  I distinctly remember my teacher, knowing that I had to be one of the least Irish people at PS 102 Queens (this being years before the Asian influx), exchanging  glances with the piano-playing teacher and shrugging.  

Then she nodded to me, I went up to the middle of the stage, the piano player played, and I proceeded to do my best approximation of an Irish jig, steps I must’ve seen on Ed Sullivan, or Danny Kaye, or (the previous year, before getting the bus for afternoon kindergarten) Captain Kangaroo. 

My dancing wasn’t good enough to draw applause or bad enough to offend.  What it did do was encourage all the kids with just slightly less chutzpah to suddenly remember that they knew how to do the Irish jig, too, and pretty soon, one by one, we amassed a whole stage full of Irish jiggers, all high stepping and kicking into the corners of their imaginary squares.

That’s all I remember about that.  This is a memory of a fearlessness that must have hit its peak when I was six, on a day before the dawn of doubt.  

Seven Choirs Communing

I used to think that when my kids were grown and I had more time I would finally indulge my inner ham and join a community theater group.  Before I got around to doing that, though, I followed a friend - a fellow ham but also a wonderful singer -- into a community choir.  Soon after that, Thursday night rehearsals became my favorite part of the week. 

I decided that community theater was no loss; perhaps a clash of egos competing for roles, a potential stress and another source of isolation in an already isolated work week. Choir, on the other hand, is communion. I sing one alto strand that braids itself into all the other strands, spinning and weaving harmonies.  Spiritually and emotionally, a group hug in a warm wrap. 

I found this choir -- where else -- in my Jewish community, following the friend with the voice. (I found the friend through about seven years of Purim shpiels, where he’s typically played Haman and sung the best songs, Snidely Whiplash-style.) He’s excellent -- going pro, in fact --- but our choir isn’t particularly fussy.  Considering that it takes anyone from nearby zip codes who can carry a tune, we sound pretty good.  I hear there were years we played Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center.

Our choir has been directed and conducted for all of its 21 years by two now fifty-something cantors, one male, one female, giving a kind of family-unit feeling to the enterprise.  Many of us "children" have been with the choir for its whole existence. I joined four years ago.

Our repertoire is remarkably varied and sometimes jazzy, coming out of an apparently flourishing composer culture of English, Hebrew and Yiddish choral music.  (Did you know that there’s a whole, quite professional chorus in NYC that sings entirely in Yiddish?)

Speaking good Hebrew and fair Yiddish, I have the linguistic advantage, but I don't read music, and that would be the more useful fluency here. I've learned a bunch of Italian music terms. I've also gotten a teeny bit better at guessing note intervals and keeping note length and tempo in mind, but I have to memorize the music by hearing it, and fast -- unless the conductors have recorded the parts for us, to CD or web. I find musical memory fascinating… Ever notice how there’s no conscious storage or retrieval? If you’ve got it down, the notes just spool out. 

It would help if I could read, though. I am too easily swept off the alto track and onto the soprano line. I often throw ego aside really late into the rehearsal schedule to sit next to a more steadfast alto, to get the lost pitches back into my ear. 

I'm impressed by the conductors, who can give every section its starting note and hear one mistake among thirty people singing four- and five-part harmonies.  I'm amazed by our accompanist, whose fingers are so brain-mapped to the piano keyboard that he can speak in music, pulling off a wordless joke with a well-timed riff of anything you might recognize, perfectly rendered. He can play anything he hears.

Rehearsal in the pews, with this David, the cantors, the group and a real grand piano is the best part; breaking down the unfamiliarity, internalizing the melody and then "cleaning up" the rough parts till we get the blends, the precision and the modulation that makes an arrangement work and Daddy happy. (Mommy is somewhat easier to please.)

Even better is rehearsing with other choirs, in their churches and in our synagogues. We do this for a couple months before the "Sing Out" festival that's on its way to becoming a biannual tradition at the Newark Museum.   We perform separately and all together, and we practice with people we’d otherwise never meet; the Maplewood Glee Club, the North Jersey Philharmonic Glee Club, the Elmwood United Presbyterian Church Celebration Mass Choir.  A more exciting communion for being shared this wide, across religion and race.  Why do I get such a kick out of being conducted by the musical director of Prospect Presbyterian?  Similar warm-ups, similar directions to shape our mouths, drop the “r”s, breathe or not breathe … in Jason Asbury’s relatively understated style, with his own form of irony. Fascinating…

A lot is made at the concert’s opening remarks of diversity and bridge-building. It's a little embarrassing, as a) there's a sense that any talk of interracial “progress”  more properly belongs to another century; I can picture my kids telling me to get over this “otherness” thing. But b) it's not; where else do I do anything social with African American/black people, aside from an odd friend at my bubble’s periphery? Where else do I have any chance to hear this wonderfully rendered "Here's One," in person?  Yeah, it's got lots of Jesus in it… so not my brand.  But so beautifully hushed and swelled, so beautifully shaped by the conductor's expressive hands...that we're all inspired. 

We're also outclassed. "Ok, you win," says a choir friend in the Celebration choir’s direction, applauding.  This group sings at NJ PAC in Newark and Ebenezer Baptist in Atlanta; for sure they're way more selective than us.  But that's ok.  I’ll do my best and look for them on YouTube.

We've also got 60 or so sweet young things from Montclair State, in matching long black dresses and matching length pearls, matching jackets and ties.  Their singers, too, have much more power and training.  They have a soloist who sends everyone to their feet. And maybe 40 even sweeter, even younger members of the Newark Boys' Choir.

At the concert’s end, this past Sunday, all 250 of us get to stand and sing together, led by a famous conductor of symphony orchestras from Vancouver to New Zealand.  Jacques LaCombe conducts an Aaron Copland piece we’d learned separately and run through with our sections combined a few times a few hours before. We sound transcendent.

Renegade Curves

I joined my local Curves for the typical goals of weight loss and fitness; getting back into clothes that had hung patiently for years, while I failed to return to the size I had bought them in.

They're still hanging. I'm still doing the machines on the circuit,  three days a week on a good week, two good weeks a month, two not as good. Andrea, or Susan, or Pat say hello from behind the desk. I scan in my bar code, and if it's anywhere near the 24th of the month the computer reminds me to get weighed and measured. 

None of us regulars are ever seen being weighed or measured.  I haven't done that since month three, about four and a half years ago.  The numerical results are not encouraging. We rather measure our success by the assumed number of pounds we haven't gained. 

More tangible is wind.  If I've been a good about doing the 14 machines on the circuit, 30 seconds each, two times around with aerobic moving in between and three pulse checks, I can run up the stairs at home without breathing hard.  I can pedal up small hills.  If I've let a week go without, I breathe hard, sweat, and walk the bike uphill. 

That alone would be good enough reason to go to Curves, but if cardio exercise

was all I cared about, I could pay far less to go to Planet Fitness.  I could push and pull against fancier machines for longer periods, hear better music and stare at TV screens with close-captioned scrolling on the bottom.

Don't want to do that.  Don't want to see strangers, or men, or start staring at screens half an hour earlier in the day than I do already.  I want to see the familiar faces of the same women I've been facing across the circuit for years.  If we get to talking about something, I barely notice that I've finished all my least-favorite machines and the 30 minutes flashes by in what feels like 10. That sociability is the not-so-secret sauce of Curves.

A lot of the women at Curves are retired teachers; I envy them their pensions and their frequent, teacher-discounted cruises. They’re very big on cruises at Curves. Seems everyone’s been to the Caribbean and Italy.  Some are up to Thailand and Viet Nam.

Of the women who come my time of week, maybe two and a half are black, two Asian, one Indian.  Most are over 60, some surprisingly into their 80’s. Some stay for Zumba, led by a supremely toned woman whose sexy moves are very roughly approximated, wearing pants with ribbons on the back pockets that fly as she bumps and lunges. Some of the women wear belly dancer coin sashes. 

The Spanish music for Zumba is a big improvement over the disco-fied Beatles medleys and other annoying recordings we often move to, in between the every-30-second "change stations now" lady. I imagine silence is very beautiful after a day of this.

I learn good neighborhood things at Curves; good stores, sales, specialists, restaurants, movies. I start a mainly solitary working day by checking in with people. I also learn about things that go on outside my mainly Jewish bubble: the women from Italian families talk about how they'll make the seven fishes for Christmas dinner, and how nobody makes the food their grandmothers made anymore.  Well of course, I can relate.

But of course I also bring the bubble with me; that film of outsiderly self-consciousness, tinged with cynicism. Curves is a pretty goyish place; its founders forbade opening on Sunday and they’re still closed then. Not bad in itself, but their politics smack of Sarah Palin's. The music they play is often corny or country. The owner installed a vibrating machine called a Theravibe and right next to it, on the wall, is a list of conditions that are supposed to be alleviated by standing on this thing in your stocking feet and being shaken at various speeds; it's got everything written there but cancer.  Some women pay an extra $50 a month to use it. I haven't taken the free trial. Yet.

We seem to voluntarily avoid talking politics and religion. But, this being New Jersey, it turns out that quite a few of my fellow exercisers and even a Zumbanik or two are Jewish. And Jewish and non, most are no slouches; some are or have been in the arts, some musicians, some business, some academe, in addition to the great preponderance of retired teachers. One of the women who works behind the desk organizes trips into New York to see Broadway plays. (Some of which aren't even musicals.) They also organized a group lunch in the struggling new Indian restaurant two doors down, whose food is excellent. I'm beginning to suspect that many of them voted for Obama, in a county that always goes Republican.

Because this Curves is even showing small signs of rebellion. You can't find this branch listed on the corporate website. Why? Because the owner of this Curves doesn't comply with the official regulations that say you can't put your own posters and decorations on the walls. You can't invite urologists in to come in and give talks on prolapsed bladders. You can't offer field trips or have a suction-cup dartboard or, well… a Theravibe. I’ve also heard -- although I can’t confirm -- that corporate wants to drop the circuit idea and be a more regular gym. The site nowadays certainly deemphasizes the circuit.

Curves corporate hasn't gone so far as to pull its machines and strip the owner of her franchise; too many others have gone under and this one absorbs the displaced members. They've just dropped her from the website. And nobody, behind the desk or on the circuit, seems to care about that or about corporate in general. So after four years, I’m no thinner but I’m not fatter either, and I've adjusted my attitude if not my body mass index. This place is beginning to feel more like home.

Sewing Fail

For  those of you who landed here on a sewing Google,  lessons to learn from my recent failure.

The Vogue 8701 I shouldn't have
tried to make a skirt from

1. Don't make a skirt from the skirt pieces of a dress pattern.

I have so many patterns that I've never sewn, I thought I could save myself from buying another and use the bias skirt of Vogue 8701 to make my sister the simple, almost-circle skirt she wanted out of the acres of beautiful wool she got me for --don't laugh -- $5 at a garage sale.  It didn't lay right when I improvised a waistband where the pieces were expecting a bodice.  I also didn't get the size right; it came out too tight, then too loose when I let the seams out. Or the length; too short.

2. Don't make an almost-circle skirt out of good wool, especially for a middle-aged waist.  

Instead of falling into thin, twirly folds below a cinched waist, all that heavy fabric just fell into a few, fattening  panels, skiing off my sister's hips at an unattractive angle and stopping too soon, not much below the knee. I had her try it on for two attempts and she was unequivocal about rejecting it both times. 

Abject sewing failure; do not attempt.

I wasted oceans of time on that skirt, making lining, inserting invisible zipper, adding seam pockets, then letting out seams and sewing them over when it came out tight.  And I'm the wide sister. But I don't blame her. Great invisible zipper insertion doesn't make up for an unflattering cut.

Vogue 8667

I have to put this project away until I've racked up two or three successes.  Then I need to take all the pieces apart and see if I can cut an actual skirt pattern pieces from them.   Most of all, I still need to make my sister a wool skirt. With less fabric. And  a skirt pattern.

It's not like I've had no successes with this wool.  Here's the dress I made my younger daughter, in the grey:

My sewing history

My mother has kept her sewing supplies in the same dark brown cookie tin since my earliest memory, which is now over 50 years old.  The tin probably contains at least some wooden spools of that vintage, now wound with brittle, dried-out Coats & Clark’s thread in several colors, assorted hand needles, and a tape 

McCall's 3584

.measure. Also a pin cushion; probably a tomato model

With these, she sewed on buttons and sewed up hems.  For real, from-scratch dressmaking, you have to go back a generation to my grandmother, whose knee-activated, table-hidden Singer is also still tucked away in my mother’s house.  But Grandma never taught my mom to sew, and my mom never taught me.

   

Could it be that Jewish women who immigrated to the US in the 1920’s associated machine sewing with sweat shops, and so never encouraged their daughters to sew? My junior high school friend Laura sewed some, and her Italian female immigrant ancestors might have treadled shoulder to shoulder with mine. The first sewing machine I saw in active use, however, belonged to Chris, my luck-of-the-draw roommate of sophomore year at college. She had a nice sturdy portable Necchi, and I can picture it on her desk in our dorm room. Chris was the country mouse to my city mouse; a common cross-cultural introduction at our upstate state school.

Some old pattern with front and back pleats.. in progress.

Chris was so bedrock American that her mother actually braided rugs. She also canned fruit, grew asparagus, sheered sheep and spun wool. Chris' father had built at least part of their house; perhaps the loft we slept in, overlooking the braided rug and the spinning wheel. I think that this degree of self reliance was unusual even for Tully, pop. about 800 back then, 20 minutes south of Syracuse. I visited for a weekend once or twice. My first up-close Republicans, judging by the newspapers they read. In any case, Chris sewed beautifully finished seams and perfectly turned, pointed collars.  Many years later, when I was pregnant, she sent me her home-sewn maternity clothes to wear.  Came in handy, too.

Butterick 5588

So I was inspired by Chris, and after using her Necchi to make an enormous womb of a stuffed chair for our dorm room, I went out and got my first machine. I bought a Singer 503  in the basement of the beautiful Pfaff sewing machine and fabric store in the middle of Rockefeller Center, near the skating rink.  Of Jetson-style, tapered design circa 1960, it was a trade-in that the Pfaff store clerks were glad to hustle out the door for $300.  It came with interchangeable cams that performed all kinds of stitches mechanically.  I’ve been buying patterns and learning by doing, off and on, ever since. 

I've owned three sewing machines now.  Two of them came to bad ends. The first, Jane Jetson model got swiped from my car when I foolishly left it visible on the back seat, parked in the vicinity of Macy's Herald Square. I was left with only the cams to remember it by. The second, a $300 Viking trade-in rescued from another Pfaffs store (follow the money), was caught needle-deep in water on the basement floor during our first-ever flood.  I replaced it with a flashier Viking; my first new machine. I never leave even the foot pedal on the floor now.

I can’t be sewing to save money.  Clothes made on the other side of the world can hardly cost more money than I can earn in equivalent hours. I just like to make things, to see and feel the potential hiding in bolts of fabric, to get away from the damn computer screen and do something low-tech but semi-high-skilled and produce something tangible, to escape from the demands of more typical, contemporary accomplishment. Sewing may not have been the absolute best use of my time. I admit, though, that making cute clothes for my daughters when they were little felt virtuous. Also fun.

Like sewers everywhere, I have fabric stashes that go back years, some of which -- it’s becoming increasingly clear -- will survive me. I still can’t resist a fabric store.  But fabric stores have gotten a lot rarer.  Here in the Jersey burbs, just off the NYC map, I can point out four places where there used to be a fabric store. When So-Fro in the mall closed, decades ago, I pounded on the shut gate like Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate.

Now, even if all you want is a certain color thread or seam binding like Woolworth’s used to sell in every neighborhood, you’re out of luck or stuck online. If you want it today, you’ve got to schlep to Joanne’s, twenty minutes west of here on the edge of the countryside, where sewing stores remain and my demographic thins out. 

I don’t bump into Jewish friends in fabric stores.  I’ve met one or two who sew, curtains or even clothes if they happen to be hard to fit. But they’re rare, too.  Look at the 25 different English-speaking women you can find demonstrating the use of the narrow hem foot on YouTube.  No Jews. Black, Hispanic, lapsed and practicing Catholic and Protestant women are shopping with me at Joanne's, but not my people, much. Nor Asians, come to think of it. My sister tells of an Indian friend who bought fabulous fabric for her daughter’s wedding, but she actually went back to India to buy it.

I don’t really care so much -- I can be New Jersey’s only Jewish sewing blogger of 2013 --  but a) I’m probably not -- Come out, come out, wherever you are; and b) some of us Jewish women may be getting lured by the new online courses, social media contests and Project Runway. (Is that still on? They’re promoting patterns with it.) Some of us may enjoy just doing something slow, some like to show off.  Somebody’s got to be buying that blue bolt of cotton Hannukah print. There’s also a recent book of Jewish sewing crafts -- I actually contributed to it -- and I hear Joanne’s is moving into a bigger store, one strip mall closer.  

Streaming Israel’s Election Returns

The Israeli news anchors play with big touch screens and fancy holographic graphics just like -- well, almost like -- their counterparts on CNN.  They drag Knesset seats this way and that, forming hypothetical coalitions.  They also speak too fast for me. I get about 50% of what they say the day after, streaming the number-one news program, Mabat, onto my laptop while it’s still Israeli Election Day in my east coast time zone.  The candidates, by contrast, speak a nice slow Hebrew; I get every word of their predictable victory speeches, whether they've really won or are just pretending. 

But I’m happy.  I’m happy like the Mabat news anchor women seem happy, in the same way that American newscasters could hardly conceal their liberal media delight when Obama got elected and re-elected.   Israel has not veered sharply rightward, as so many had feared.  The specter of a triumphant “Jews are different” Naftali Bennett sweeping to second place with his HaBayit HaYehudi party, described in David Remnick’s New Yorker portrait this week, has not come to pass.  The Israeli center has come out of hiding or hibernation to reassert a desire for normality and democracy that I am very relieved to see.

Naftali Bennett was the pick of my kippah sruga (knitted kippa, Modern Orthodox) relatives (at least the 20-somethings, I see via Facebook) and the nightmare of my friend and fellow high-school alumna Judy, who moved to Israel 35 years ago or so, when immigration from the U.S. was (by definition) Zionist but secular left-leaning, not like it’s been the past 25 years.  Everyone fits their demographic; my relatives are hard-working, middle-class, third- and fourth-generation Israelis who have no faith or interest in a two-state solution and whose second generation delivered the Bat Yam vote to Bibi.  Judy is triply slotted into the left via academe (TAU PhD candidate), home address (Tel Aviv) and artsy profession (theatrical lighting designer).

Less predictable might be my other friend and fellow alumna who left Brooklyn in that same era and wound up in the north.  Ann might have given Bennett her vote but for his anti-woman religious bedfellows, she says.  That’s an association Bennett tries to dispel, coming on as very hip and approachable to the American press, and giving a secular woman, Ayelet Shaked, the fifth spot on his ticket. Ann said she’d vote for Bibi instead.

Ann’s gone through two tours of military service with two sons, ducked Kassams and spent time in shelters.  It’s easy to see how that might move one rightward.  Certainly, it’s a test I’ve never undergone. At the same time, it’s also easy to see what makes Israel-minded American Jews queasy when Israelis deprioritize democracy.  How can American Jews agree,  when democracy and equal rights for minorities are precisely what's allowed us to do so well here?  

On the third hand, I shouldn’t pretend to care so much about the spread of democracy; a lot of the world seems totally unready for it.  I just don’t want Israel ruling over a hostile population whose disenfranchised will come to outnumber its citizens. It will coarsen their souls and cost them serious business. Neither do I want Israel to count only the US, evangelicals and Micronesia among its friends. 

On the fourth hand, we Jews have been a non-threatening, good little minority here, well-behaved and productive for the most part, and happy to be American. The great thing about America is that in the peoplehood sense, it belongs to everyone and to no one.  Ever since we killed off the Indians, as my Netanyahu-supporting relative once pointed out.  

Yiddish Class: a Forshpeis

I taught my “one-shot Introduction to Yiddish” Sunday, billed as a “forshpeis” -- an appetizer.  13 people showed up, mostly friends from book club or the women’s Rosh Chodesh group or the Hebrew reading course I taught a couple times.  But there were also two new faces, including one of two whole men, allowing us to demonstrate that Yiddish, like other respectable European languages, has gendered verbs and nouns.

My Sholem Aleichem
Bobble Head Doll

Me teaching Yiddish is something of a chutzpeh; I took all of one year of Yiddish in college, all of thirty-something years ago. I’ve tried to keep it fresh since then with the occasional Sholem Aleichem story, song, conversation, class, or the occasional Folksbeine show on the upper west side.  But in my shul, this makes me resident mayven; me with my tattered/tserisseneh Uriel Weinreich College Yiddish text book and dictionary.  Maybe -- efsher -- there’s someone in the congregation who’s more fluent. But they don’t have my compulsion to do stand-up. Or they literally can’t stand up that long. In any case, it’s an easy, friendly audience and on Sunday we laughed and learned a lot.   

No classroom rows for my students and no textbook; they sat in a circle with their names written at their feet, so they could spend the two hours talking to each other, cultivating their seedling vocabularies.  I prepared sheets with a couple of verbs and phrases, pronouns, who-what-when and some nouns, using my old Hebrew word processor. DavkaWriter, circa Windows 95, conveniently includes a keyboard with the subtle Yiddish variations on the Alephbet:  the paired yuds that say “ay” (no line beneath) and “ei” (little flat line vowel beneath); the paired vovs that read as “v.”  Reclaim your Ashkenazic “aw” vowel -- the one modern Israeli Hebrew turned to “ah” -- change ayin from dumb silent letter to “e” as in egg, and you’re mostly good to go. 

Used only for reference -
but it's good.

Under my prodding, my students asked and told each other their names, what they did for a living, what they and others were or were not (mothers, fathers, aunts, daughters, sons, Jews, students, teachers, nurses, doctors). 

Also nudniks, goniffs, bubbes and zaydes.  That’s the fun thing about teaching Yiddish to over-fifties;  when they tickle the right neurons, even those who can’t read Hebrew letters -- even those who might not have grown up Jewish but merely lived near New York -- realize they have vestigial vocabulary to draw on; enough to recognize words and phrases I throw out without introduction or warning.  Those who haven’t been pretty little girls for 40 years remember “Shayne maydl.”  They remember being told to eat, my child; to go to sleep, to come here, to come home, by doting grandparents using little bits of Yiddish for extra sweetness or intimacy.

Then we have two students -- bright professional women, in their eighties and nineties -- who can actually take off in whole if imperfect, grammar-free sentences.  My Yiddish was artificially induced at Rutgers; theirs was born at home in Brooklyn. These two enjoy the class as much as anyone, hearing the language of their long-gone parents.  And we love to have them with us, reminding us how authentic the language can sound.  They thank me profusely and encourage us to continue with a course.  And most participants say they agree.  We’ll see…