WaPo runs an article today about the obnoxious ostentation of today's Bar Mitzvahs. It kinda brings out the anti-Semite in ya, but if the Jews are ridiculously extravagant, they're merely setting the American pace. Excerpts, so you can see how the reversed ghetto lives:
"We had a kid who was really into 'Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,' " James [a Bar Mitzvah party planner] recalls, "so we had a purple suit made for him, and we hired these people to be Oompa Loompas and they came out and danced. We had these trees with candy all over them, with signs that said 'Do not eat.' It was fantastic."
For a girl named Lexy, James devised what he called a "Lex and the City" theme, for which he rented a pink couch that was an actual prop in the similarly named HBO show. For a lad nicknamed Bull -- yes, a Jewish kid called Bull -- he rented a mechanical bull and built a saloon around it.
On a recent Saturday night, James is padding around the top floor of a loft in Long Island City, which he and 50 employees have turned into a sort of dinner theater fun house. The theme tonight is guitars because the star of the evening, the just-bar-mitzvahed Russell Efros, is a budding guitarist. Secondhand six-strings are perched on the centerpieces of each table. An ice sculpture of a guitar is melting in a corner.
"Five minutes to showtime!" James shouts in a way that suggests that he's looking forward to the show.
James has hired, as he always does, a group of men from a modeling agency, whom he calls "butlers" and whose job it is to greet guests and fetch drinks. He's also brought along a group of women in tight black bodysuits. One of them is now stationed by something called a "vodka slide," a massive block of ice with a groove carved down the middle -- for the adults, of course.
"It's one of the things we're known for, hiring gorgeous staff," James says as he helps a bartender prepare martini glasses right before the start of festivities. . . .
Hundreds of New York bar mitzvahs cost $100,000 or more. Many top the quarter-million-dollar mark. . . .
By general consensus, this whole bar mitzvah thing started to supersize about 25 years ago. Before that, it was possible to celebrate this rite of passage with a modest affair, perhaps a cocktail party followed by dinner. Maybe a band. There were plenty of expensive spectacles, of course, but they were the exception. . . .
The grandiose bar mitzvah -- here's a shocker -- seems to be an American invention. It isn't hard to find rabbis who worry about this arms race to ever-flashier fetes, who think parents are driven by the need to publicly demonstrate their affluence, who wonder what poker and popcorn have to do with Judaism.
"I think these events miss the point," says Rabbi Jon-Jay Tilsen of Congregation Beth El-Keser Israel in New Haven, Conn. "A bar mitzvah is about connection to community and connection to God, it's about accepting responsibility, it's the moment that parents accept that their children are growing up."
