And as she ate her oatmeal every day for a month, she cried out to God. “Lord, here I’ve been serving you faithfully on the mission field for years, and you said you would supply all my needs. Why have you allowed this to happen to me? Why didn’t you send me any money? Why didn’t you give me real food? Even the poorest people in this city eat meat and vegetables. Is this how you treat your servants?”

Thankfully, her check did arrive the next month, along with a plane ticket back to her home town. Her church arranged for her to see a doctor who was part of their congregation.

The doctor examined the missionary, did some tests, and finally told her, “Well, it looks like you’re going to make it. And I’m amazed, because if you’re at all typical, what you’ve probably been eating would normally kill you. Even the conventional medication has recently been proven to be dangerous. According to a journal article that was just published, the only safe treatment for this disease is a 30-day oatmeal diet.”

- Source unknown

There you have it… from Bob Jones, Sr. to Rome to gay rights… in just six degrees.

“From my parents. When she was a teenager, instead of a picture of Elvis, my mother had a photograph of Shlomo Carlebach on her wall. My grandmother once caught her looking at it and murmuring, ‘Oh Shlomo, you’re so dreamy!’ In the ’70s, my mother taught Klezmercise classes at the Jewish Community Center. She was klezmer when klezmer wasn’t cool. Her father, my grandfather, used to play clarinet at weddings, and my mother has 78 rpm recordings of her own grandfather’s klezmer band in Poland, before the War. ”

Apparently the band wasn’t available for recordings after the War. The rabbi didn’t talk anymore about it.

“My father was a Baptist kid from the Ozarks, an authentic white Anglo-Saxon Protestant. He met my mother at the university. He went to the Baptist church every Sunday morning, but he never took me and never even talked about his faith. That was his agreement with my mother when they married, that I would be raised totally Jewish. Still, I feel sorry that my father’s spirituality is almost completely blank in my life, a blank space. He taught me banjo but no gospel songs, and they divorced when I was twelve.”

Question: Where were you raised?

“University City Missouri, in St. Louis county. Our neighborhood used to be predominantly Jewish, but most of the synagogues have relocated south and west. Many of their members are now concentrated near North-and-South and Olive.

Question: Jewish retirement homes?

“In a manner of speaking.”

Question: How did the congregation get its name?

“Red tape. Official incompetence. Me. It was all my fault. We were all set to call it Shomer Neginah, which is loosely translated as the laws of the stringed instruments. But I wrote the name wrong on the official application and after that, there was nothing we could do.”

Shomer Negiah means the laws of touching. Every orthodox Jewish single has to explain on a first date what that means.

The rabbi was slow in warming up to me. It turned out that he had become a little gun-shy around inquisitive Gentiles, ever since Sid (of Sid’s Crawdad Palace) found out he was Jewish. Sid had been a fan of pro-Israel preachers like John Hagee since way back, and he couldn’t get over the experience of meeting his first real Jew. He immediately began trying to scheme up a promotion that could draw a large portion of the rabbi’s congregation into the Crawdad Palace. First he wanted to host a Shomer Negiah Singles Slow Dance. Then he proposed a Yom Kippur Banquet. Finally his eyes lit up.

“This is it, Rabbi, an offer you can’t refuse,” Sid said.

“So try me,” said the rabbi, polishing his harmonica.

“Listen to this: a Saturday All The ShellfishYou Can Eat Buffet. Just for your congregation. How about that?”

“All the shellfish we can eat?” asked the rabbi, though he had heard Sid the first time. He was hoping it would sound better the second time.

“Yeah,” said Sid. “What do you think?”

The rabbi thought. “Is the price more than a dollar fifty?”

“A dollar fifty? That’s the price of a soda!”

“That would be fair. A least we could drink the soda.”

I haven’t seen the latest edition, but some of my favorite fake headlines included:
Jack Chick buys popular comic strips
Man resigns job to listen to talk radio
Smells of Palestine enhance Christmas dramas

As Ogden Nash once wrote,

A one-l lama, he’s a priest.
A two-l llama, he’s a beast.
And I will bet a silk pajama
There isn’t any three-l lllama.

Be that as it may, I personally have never heard a talking lama or a talking llama.