A Twisted, Twistin' Memorial Day

First of two parts, including dance songs from the early 1960s and the startling story of the Isley Brothers at my Bar-Mitzvah

A public Spotify playlist for this story is at Wayne’s Twisted, Twistin Dance Party. Enjoy!

1. The Wrong Report Card

In eighth grade at winter holiday break  at Valley Stream North High School (a 7-12 school) in Franklin Square, NY, my report card got mixed up with that of another classmate named Robbins. This caused his mother, who opened the mail, to nearly have a coronary. Because of all the red ink. Because of the numbers the other Robins, me, had on his report card: not just near failures, like 64 or 60, but falling off the cliff failures, like 45 and 50, in science and math, and even easier subjects, red ink splashed all across the pages of the report card.

I opened the Other Robbins' report card, flashed it in fromt of my parents, salutarian-quality numbers at least: If he had lower than a 96 or 97 in any subject, I don't recall. It had to be a mistake. It was a mistake. Other Robbins and I have the same birthday, too, but that's where the similarity ended.

When he showed up late at a class reunion with his mother at 2013, we exchanged pleasantries. He is a tenured English professor at a Ivy League university. He got his B.A. and M.A. at Harvard. A surprising number of my classmates from the class of 1967 at a seemingly ordinary middle-of-the-middle class public high school on Long Island, had gone to Harvard for various degrees. (Dr. Robert Fischer went to Harvard after 11th grade at Valley Stream North High, which is a step above Lebron James and Kobe Bryant going right from high school to the NBA.) In fact, so many had gone to classy New England universities and stayed to make their lives in the area that the reunion party was held at a hotel, in 2013, in the suburbs of Boston.

Other Robbins remembered the report card incident, but he was not eager to discuss it with my friends, for whom it had become a nearly 50 year old meme. Other Robbins had remembered me as a good dancer. I was not a good dancer, but I was adequate, even fearless, at The Twist. Fortunately, the Twist era lasted almost three years, sixth grade through eighth grade. Here is John Travolta and Uma Thurman doing The Twist in Pulp Fiction:

The 2013 get-together wasn't an official VSN class of 1967 reunion; it was just for us, "The Class." Starting in fourth and fifth grade, the same 30 of us were together through eighth grade. We were an educational experiment. Half were students were high achievers; the other half were high potential, as displayed in IQ tests. (I don't think any of us knew at the time knew this was the reason we had been chosen to be together year after year, from fourth grade through eighth.)

  Once the Other Robbins family and the Robins family got the report cards straightened out, my parents were called in to talk to the guidance counselor about my grades. My parents were asked if all was well at home. "Oh, just perfect." (Liars, but...) The guidance counselor asked me. "Yeah, it's OK, it's good." I did not tell the guidance counselor that my only immediate ambition was to get suspended from school for smoking on school grounds, so that my name would appear on the "suspended" list sent to every home room. "Suspended" was my idea of honor roll.

My father told the guidance counselor that the previous semester, I had been working very hard on my bar-mitzvah that Dec. 1, 1962, which was true, and now I would be able to apply myself to school again, which was not true. Ten years later, my parents were divorcing.

My Bar-Mitzvah: Now that was something. At a Bar-Mitzvah, the 13 year old Jewish boy is inducted into adulthood, and has the full responsibilities of a Jewish man. I did study hard: I learned to read my Parshah portion from the Torah scroll, and then did the required reading of the Haftarah, that week's reading from the Book of Prophets. There is also a speech, in which the Bar-Mitzvah boy usually fills in the blanks of a pro forma talk that the rabbi has already written. Thank you Rabbi, teachers, synagogue Sisterhood, Brotherhood, parents, grandparents, relatives, friends. I told Rabbi Zivitz of the Franklin Square Jewish Center I wanted to write my own speech, and since I was a good student despite some behavioral issues (like downing as many cups of the small cups of sweet kosher wine as possible at the kiddush after the Saturday morning services before they were taken away), he let me go for it. In fact, I had spent the best part of the year working on my Bar-Mitzvah plot, and so I went to the lectern, nobody knew what hit them.

I started to wail: "I feel all, all, alright!" With me on the bimah, the stage, a curtain opened, and the Isley Brothers and some mini-skirted dancers rose from the orchestra pit.

They sang resposively: "Yeah yeah, yeah yeah, ooh!"

I chanted: "Since I met you Rabbi, you've been so good to me." Rabbi Zivitz's glasses start to fall off his nose, he's in a fever sweat, he doesn't like the way this is starting.

Then together with the Isleys, the miniskirted dancers mooning the audience: "You know you me want to Shout, Shout, ooh Shout, a little bit softer now, a little bit louder now, woo! A little bit softer now, a little bit louder now..." I'm doing splits, the Isley Brothers are doing sommersaults, the dancers are shaking their tail-feathers...

I see that my grandmother Molly Rabinowitz, had fainted. My father's mother, so devout that she insisted on walking more than a mile to synagogue. That is why we had scheduled the bar-mitzvah for two weeks before my mid-Demember birthday, in the hope of catching the last warm wave before winter. Her devotion was rewarded: That day was the warmest December 1 on record until that point, the temperature well into the 60s.

But she was in trouble now. My brother David, then 9 years old and deeply attached to the family, starts to cry, catches my eye and I can read his lips: "You just killed grandma!" Her husband, my grandfather Harry, seemed shocked, but I thought I saw a twinge of curiosity. Various uncles and aunts start shouting, "shame on you, shame, shame," and they begin tearing up the envelopes with their bar-mitzvah gift checks, and one of those uncles wonders aloud, "Who are those schvartzes!" (Derogatory Yiddish term that translates literally as “black.”)

Some try to leave, but I had my Catholic school friends from St. Catherine's of Siena across the street keep the door bolted from the outside.

The Isleys keep singing, like a voodoo incantation: "a little bit softer now, a little bit softer now, a little bit louder now, a little bit louder now...Whoo!" My friends, sitting in the front row, had been clapping along, the girls get up, take off their shoes, waving their scarves, my friends, Alan Grossinger and Eliot Nipomnick, Marc Payne and Jeff Brook, take off their neckties, wave them in the air, as they toss their yarmulkes heavenward. Fistfights break out among cousins from opposite sides of the family. Divorces are requested and accepted.

Sirens get louder coming from Franklin Avenue and Hempstead Turnpike, smoke has been spotted, and the Franklin Square Jewish Center starts to spin, breaking free of its foundation, elevating, twisting towards the clouds, higher and higher, and I look down and everything looks like "Chagall Over Vitebsk" before normalcy is restored.

My parents, Marty and Phyllis Robins, keep staring straight ahead.

"I don't see anything, Marty, do you?"

My father, "What do you mean? What's to see? It's a lovely bar-mitzvah. I'm very proud of him."

"Yes, I am too." By the time the smoke has cleared, the shul returned to its foundation, the Isley Brothers disappeared, my grandmother back to life, I continue reading from my speech: "Thank you, once again, Rabbi Zivitz, parents, grandparents, teachers, friends, for these wonderful gifts, the traditional fountain pen, the Siddur, the savings bond. Now we will go to Kiddush, and we'll see you at the party tomorrow night."

To be continued…