Kikes--er, sorry, Semites: on bikesBeen feeling like there’s something missing from your life? And might that something be a calendar featuring doughy Jewish men? On motorcycles? Holding cats? And did I mention that they’re naked? (The men, not the cats. Well…the men and the cats.)

Look no further! For just $20, you can get a year’s worth of Hebraic hotness in the Semites on Bikes’ “Kitty Porn” calendar. The SOBs are a self-proclaimed group of
"12 nude, middle-aged, mostly out-of-shape Jewish men discreetly covered by cats." Um, yeah.

Want in on the foreskin-free action? Send an email to Semites on Bikes to order your calendar today. It might just make a great Father’s Day gift. If your father is gay. And weird. (Proceeds go to the Humane Society of Baltimore.)

Status update: Carla Sosenko is fascinated by the unwitting political discourse of Facebook status updates.

We’ve had a presumptive Democratic presidential candidate for less than 48 hours, and Anne L. Fritz is not happy. I haven’t seen Anne in months, but I know she’s pissed because her Facebook status update told me so:Facebook: reach out and touch someone

Anne L. Fritz says 16 out of 100 women in the Senate, 76 women out of 435 Members of Congress and 0 women out of 43 presidents is no reason to celebrate.

Bari Cayne isn’t happy either, but for different reasons:

Bari Cayne can't believe the Democrats just lost another eight years in the White House.

Not everyone agrees with this assessment. For example:

Alyse Livingston is feeling the change in the air. It's about time.

The Facebook status update has always been a way to clue in your friends (and peripheral friends and frenemies and sometime hookups and exes) to your (arguably) notable comings and going. Usually they’re of the basic variety (Jane Doe is daydreaming), and often they wink at cultural phenomenons in a hipstery (i.e. snarky) way or shamelessly self-promote. But something funny happened on the way to the election: Status updates got serious.

Or at least more civic-minded. Out of my 166 friends (OMG, is that an acceptable amount? Too low? When did admitting your number of Facebook friends start to feel like copping to your number of sexual partners?), five were related to the other night’s election events alone. Add to that a handful of oblique and/or vague update references that *could* be about the election. (I’d need someone smarter than I or the update author to know for sure.) My own status just days ago (even though I used to be a Hillary girl) said, “GObama, go!” (So very clever.)

One of today’s updates was from my friend Joe, who had the luck (or misfortune) of winding up directly below Anne. Looking at the juxtaposed updates made it hard not to think of my friends as sparring:

Joe Tirella thinks today is a great day for America.

As in, “Joe Tirella, unlike Anne L. Fritz, thinks we have plenty of reasons to celebrate.”

Of course, that’s not what he meant. In fact, unless Joe, who is not connected to Anne on Facebook, were scouring my friend list, he wouldn’t even know about Anne’s pro-Hillary leanings, or about Anne’s existence, for that matter.

Meanwhile, Kathy Erich Dowd is shocked (and relieved) the Democratic primary is finally over!

I kind of feel the same. But:

Carla Sosenko would vote for any Democrat over right-wing establishmentarian gasbag McCain any day.

I better go update my profile.

Burn After Reading is the latest effort from Joel and Ethan Coen, arguably two of the most prolific, original and unexcitable (even in the face of an Academy Award win) filmmakers of our time. The movie’s big draws are Coen darlings Frances McDormand and George Clooney, as well as an up-and-coming young lad you may have heard of named Brad Pitt. But the entire ensemble is rife with talent: Tilda Swinton, John Malkovich and character actors like Juno’s J.K. Simmons and The Visitor’s Richard Jenkins round out the cast.

Add the cumulative talent of the stars to the zany trailer — which promises the kind of romp the Coens are known for (more Fargo or Lebowski than the adaptation No Country) — and this film becomes pretty damn hard to wait for.

This so-farfetched-it-could-be-real clip features Zack Galifianakis as himself — well, as someone named Zack Galifianakis who also writes for Utne (and Philippino Digest!) interviewing Michael Showalter, a.k.a. Widge Wemnin, the “most indie rocker of our time.” He’s so indie, in fact, he doesn’t even play music. Like, ever.

Silly? Totally. But also sort of spot-on. It’s not so hard to imagine Widge selling out McCarren Park Pool sometime soon.

Our next president shouldn’t be a person of faith but a person of doubt. So says Bill Maher, one of the country's most outspoken doubters. His new film, Religulous, directed by Borat’s Larry Charles, follows the irreverent humorist as he travels the globe talking to people about God and religion. Maher and the crew employed self-described guerrilla filming to get their shots (at the Vatican, at the Wailing Wall), and the prospect of watching them in action seems too good (and controversial and potentially offensive) to resist.

While the film didn’t hit its anticipated Easter release, it's currently slated for a June 20 opening. Here’s Maher talking to Larry King about the film.

Joshua Suzanne, proprietor of the East Village’s Rags-a-Go-Go, likes to talk to people who wander into her shop. And she likes to videotape herself talking to them, and to post said videos on YouTube. Luckily, she had her camcorder poised and ready when Israeli filmmaker Ari Libsker came a’calling. What emerged was a strange but compelling, accent-inflected (hers: Massachusetts, his: Israeli) conversation about Libsker’s new documentary, Stalags, which opened at the Film Forum last Wednesday.

Libsker’s much-buzzed-about film explores the popular literary genre of Holocaust porn that emerged in the 60s. The booklets (stalags) were a huge hit among Israelis, particularly the children of survivors, who were led to believe the tales of buxom Nazi prison guards raping and torturing captured American soldiers were for real. (Indiewire has a pretty in-depth assessment of the phenomenon in its review of Libsker’s film.)

Libsker tells Suzanne he was motivated by a desire to know what could have possibly made this sexy but sadistic (or masochistic, depending on how you look at it) genre so popular in Israel. Time Out New York’s David Fear posits a more specific corollary question: “The insane popularity of this pulp-porn among Israelis makes you wonder: Was this the result of a society searching for catharsis in smut, or the largest case of Stockholm syndrome ever diagnosed?”

Libsker’s topic is inarguably fascinating, and the New York Times review of the film  criticizes only its brevity. (It’s just too short — 63 minutes — to do the topic justice).

Nestled among racks of second-hand shirts, the filmmaker and the shopgirl manage to have an important little chat about a topic that is as disturbing as it is titillating. And in an interesting twist, Libsker tells Suzanne that those wishing to view a YouTube clip of his film can do so on his Web site, www.stalags.com. Go ahead and try. YouTube removed the video for use of the words “sex” and “Holocaust.”

Stalags plays at Film Forum through April 22.

If you're unfortunate enough to join the growing ranks of stranded air travelers, cross your fingers for the mother of all diversions: Sacha Baron Cohen was recently spotted in the Wichita airport filming his latest faux doc, Brüno: Delicious Journeys Through America for the Purpose of Making Heterosexual Males Visibly Uncomfortable in the Presence of a Gay Foreigner in a Mesh T-Shirt. (So far the only other credited cast member is Real World alum Trishelle, as herself. Watching a flaming Austrian reporter get into trouble with a trashy fame whore sounds like it has the comic potential to outdo even Borat's kidnapping of Pamela Anderson.)

Check out the prankster king doing what he does best -- unleashing his squirmalicious hijinks on the public without breaking a sweat. (And keep your eye on the guy behind the guy, Bruno's apparent Azamat. You go, boy.)

If Ab Fab's Patsy and Edina had been born as kvetchy Jewesses with Boston accents, they might have been Ronna and Beverly. The comedy duo (a.k.a. Jessica Chaffin and Jamie Denbo) are taking their Jewish-mothers-behaving-badly act on the road, stopping off at NYC's UCB Theatre this Thursday. Check out this clip (featuring Ugly Betty's Ana Ortiz as Beverly's "girl") and watch as Ro and Bev prep for Passover in all their Atavan-fueled, self-involved glory. Paint the Jews in the best light it doesn't, but would it kill you to laugh a little?

Related: Yentas United Against Intermarriage

As Passover approaches, let us take a moment to remember those Jews we’ve lost—you know, the ones who consumed “matzoh with a dark history” and were transformed into the living dead only to be hunted down by the goyim they preyed upon. Wait. What?

Add Hasidic Jews to any situation and it instantly becomes funnier—that’s the theory behind Sam Falconi and Oliver Noble’s Night of the Living Jews, a Heeb Magazine–produced film about Jewish zombies who use their lethal peyos to attack gentiles. The film premiered in October, though if you happen to live in Australia or Canada you can catch it this spring. It features Melissa Leo, Homicide vet and star of the Sundance darling Frozen River, as Jewish Mother Zombie. (It could have been worse—she could have been cast as Bagel Zombie.)

Will the zombies be taken down by the power of a bacon double cheeseburger? You’re going to have to watch to find out.

Herr Slinky: This is a pretty non-intimidating swastika“120 Funny Swastika Cartoons” certainly sounds like an oxymoron, but who knows better how to turn beets into borscht than the Jews? In We Have Ways of Making You Laugh, New Yorker cartoonist Sam Gross takes what is arguably the most reprehensible symbol in history and turns it on its head by making it silly and commonplace. The outcome? A woman performing oral sex on a swastika, a mermaid learning to goose step and white mice with a Nazi flag above their mousehole. Gross’ idea is that by making such a loaded image ridiculous, we strip it of its power. As he says in his afterword, “If something is humorous, you can’t get angry at it; nor can it inspire fear.”

Gross’ drawings run the gamut from goofy to bawdy to inscrutable in that way New Yorker cartoons can be. Some evoke spontaneous laughter while others just elicit a perplexed “huh?” But no matter your reaction to the drawings themselves, it’s hard to deny the effect of seeing them as a whole. As I viewed Gross' cartoons, the swastika lost its ability to turn my stomach and make the hairs on my arm stand up. Looking at a kitty cat with swastika-shaped whiskers really did somehow make it less terrifying.

Not everyone loves what Gross has done, of course. HuffPo's Doree Lewak says, "There's tacky and then there's poor taste. The category for this book fits several pegs below the latter." And the ADL's national director, Abraham Foxman, worries the book could be an affront to survivors (like him). The Jewish Week article about the book features both Foxman and a rabbi (the author of a book called Taking the Shoah on the Road) who thinks humor is necessary to healing. It's hard to fault those who find Gross' book offensive or think making fun of something as repugnant as the swastika is simply not something we should do -- or worse, that trivializing it somehow puts us in harm's way. We can only hope that Gross is right -- that our resilient laughter is far more powerful than the swastika could ever be.

Want to see more of the cartoons? Radar has a gallery.

What do you get when you combine the talents of comedian Michael Ian Black (a Jew), David Schwimmer (another Jew!), Hank Azaria (a Sephardic Jew!) and Simon Pegg (not a Jew, but still funny)? You get the charming (but woefully comma-deficient) comedy Run Fatboy Run, that’s what.

Schwimmer directs Azaria and Pegg in what screenwriter Black calls a sweet romantic comedy about a fat guy who runs a marathon. Pegg (who also co-wrote the script) stars as said fat guy, reportedly strapping on prosthetic stomachs to fill out the role, since --as  any fan of Shaun of the Dead knows -- Pegg is one skinny dude. The überbeautiful Thandie Newton, perhaps doing penance for the dreadful Crash, stars as Pegg's erstwhile love interest.

This quirky little rom-com looks like the perfect antidote to all the on-screen swimming pit bulls, deranged oil tycoons and Alzheimers patients of the past few months. Fatboy premiered in England last year and hits theaters stateside on March 28.

Kids, stay back: MazoPhil Mazo’s upcoming comedy-album debut, Pervert, drops April 1. Listen as Mazo, a vaguely creepy comic from Jersey, riffs on the "I'm less Jewy than you are" J-Date courtship ritual.

Ever wondered what the fate of America's knocked-up sweetheart, Juno MacGuff, would have been were she born to liberal New York Jews? Look no further than the "preview" for Jewno, the 92nd Street Y Tribeca's tribute to the Oscar-winning quip-a-thon. Our heroine is reimagined as a Semitic America Ferrera lookalike with a "knish in the oven" and her very own bagel phone. Look for the cameo from Mac MacGuff himself (J.K. Simmons) as "Jewbell's" super-Heeby dad.

Seems like Hollywood's only just shaking the Oscar-party confetti out of its hair, and already there's talk of next year's awards contenders. Defiance, directed by Edward Zwick (Blood Diamond, The Last Samurai), is generating lots of buzz. It's the story of three Jewish brothers (Daniel Craig, Liev Schreiber and Jamie Bell) who escape from Nazi-occupied Poland and band together with Russian resistance fighters in the Belarusian forest to fight back. The action-packed trailer, in theaters now, promises an inspirational story of unity and humanity while delivering plenty of eye candy in the form of Craig and Schreiber (and Bell if you're 15). Sounds like enough to put the stereotype of the nebbishy Jew to rest.

Defiance is scheduled to hit theatres in the fall.

The gorgeous Annie Leibovitz–shot cover of April’s Vanity Fair features Sarah Silverman, Tina Fey and Amy Poehler done up as ethereal Grecian goddesses. (Poehler keeps it real by copping a feel off Fey.) But not even that can compare with what Leibovitz delivers inside: Silverman done up to look like Amy Winehouse!

All the funnyladies profiled in the story, including Sandra Bernhard and Susie Essman, are styled as versions of familiar pop tarts like Paris and Britney. But a tattooed, behived, raccoon-eyed Sarah’s resemblance to the struggling Grammy winner is mind-blowing. Make that mind-blowingly AWESOME. Who knew cross-fertilizing our favorite lewd and crude Jewess with our beloved train wreck could be so hot!

Behold: Silverhouse

Back in the day, giving someone a mixtape was big-time. Those sometimes fumbling, often cheesy attempts at human connection were so much more heartfelt than a poke on Facebook, infinitely more earnest than giving someone the BeFri half to your StNds necklace.

The lovably wacky Michael Showalter has a lot of love for the mix tape, and as a promo for the Plug 2008 Independent Music Awards (happening tomorrow in NYC), he’s made three short films about those charming relics of yesteryear. So break out your Z-Cavs, bust out the tape deck and step into Michael’s mixtape store, won’t you?

Looks like our favorite neocon fruit loop is at it again. Righteously indignant about a comment on The Huffington Post suggesting Nancy Reagan should go ahead and die in her tub (the comment was in response to a story on Reagan's recent fall), Bill O'Reilly declared that Arianna Huffington is no different than a Nazi or a KKK member. (It should be noted that Huffington, the co-founder and EIC of HuffPo, is not the author of the Reagan-targeted comment.)

Really, Bill? A Nazi? Yes, he so deftly reasoned, because they "both want people to die." Oh, Bill, you slay me. (Not like how the Nazis slew 6 million Jews, but in a funny way.)

Even Bill's O'Reilly Factor guest, treify conservative blogger Mary Katharine Ham, ended up defending Huffington, all the while seeming to quietly acknowledge that Billy boy had finally flipped his fucking lid. Click here to see the clip in all its unhinged glory:

The Counterfeiters, the Austrian film based on the true story of Jews forced to work as counterfeiters in Sachsenhausen concentration camp, took the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film Sunday night.

In his acceptance speech, director Stefan Ruzowitzky said, "There have been some great Austrian filmmakers working here, thinking of Billy Wilder, Fred Zinnemann, Otto Preminger. Most of them had to leave my country because of the Nazis, so it sort of makes sense that the first Austrian movie to win an Oscar is about the Nazis' crimes." So suck it, Nazis.

Now go see the film, which opened in New York and LA on Friday. Here's the trailer:

J-Love conquers all: A JDate billboard looms over Boston I am a New York City–dwelling, L Word–watching, liberal-minded hipsterish hetero. A girl who has always thought it would be kinda sorta maybe cool to make out with another girl but never has. That kind. And yet....

As my 30th birthday approached, I found myself single — and celibate — for a longer stretch than I've ever wanted to be. As more and more friends settled into the adult worlds of marriage and parenthood, I started lamenting my missed opportunities, as if 30 marked some sort of slow decline toward death.

I was embroiled in a tumultuous on-again, off-again relationship — with JDate. What had once been exciting — a sea of eligible Jewish men for the taking! — had become a virtual waiting room of guys who liked to work hard and play hard and enjoyed staying in as much as they liked going out.

It was a particularly heinous-feeling I'm-never-going-to-have-sex-again kind of night when I received a Flirt from ArtsyGrrl18*, a curvaceous and pretty woman seeking a woman. Her message was nothing more than a cheesy canned pick-up line chosen from a drop-down menu: "You're burning up my monitor — are you always this hot?" But I felt a flutter in my stomach. And while, yeah, OK, I'm straight, I didn't really care. I was smitten. Sort of.

I was sick of men. Sick of corresponding with guys only to meet them in person and find out we have zero chemistry, to repeatedly come to the soul-crushing realization that the dream lover I'd imagined doesn't exist anywhere in this universe. Sick of pretending to be indifferent just so I won't scare them away. I'm not indifferent. Why should I be? Men could keep their issues and their fear of commitment. They could have their erectile dysfunction and their emotional unavailability. I was moving on to bigger, better (softer, nicer-smelling) things.

I immediately drafted a response. "I'm burning up your monitor?" I asked incredulously. "Come on, that's almost as bad as some of the guys on here." My reply accomplished a few things. It flirted back, it put her in her place and, perhaps most important, it reminded her that I was used to being courted by men. I hit send without stopping to wonder what I was doing.

A few days passed with no reply, and I began to worry. Had it been wrong to mention men? It was no secret that I'm straight. What was the sense of playing down that fact when it was, in fact, a fact? Maybe that was even part of what drew her to me — I was, in theory, off-limits. Every day I skimmed through message upon message from a nondescript crop of men, obsessively refreshing my in-box, automatically declining IM requests from the likes of Mensch4U and JewtasticNYC, hoping that each new page would bring a sign of ArtsyGrrl18.

And then, on the fifth day, there was light, in the form of a blinking-envelope new-message icon. "LOL, Carla," she'd written back. "You rock so hard." How adorable, I thought. What a gem! It's true, a similar response from a man probably would have found its way into my Trash bin. But I was hooked. There was no doubt about it: ArtsyGrrl18 would signify my first trip into Girltown.

"I think I'm going to go out with a girl!" I told friends. They all looked at me strangely, as if I'd told them I was thinking of piercing my nipples or moving to India, that I was going to do something that sounded adventurous and edifying but in reality was probably foolish and regrettable. And they all asked the same thing: "Do you really want to date a woman?"

Straight-girl lesbian-dating: Don't knock it till you've tried it A good question. Did I want to date a woman? Well let's see. I love women. Most of my closest friends are women. But no, all right, that's not what they meant. So did I want to kiss a woman? Well, sure! Maybe. Life's too short not to try it, right? And kissing's always nice. OK, forget kissing. Did I want to get naked and sweaty and dirty with a woman? Oh boy, now it was getting tricky. Maybe if Susan looked like Diane Lane. (She did not.) And maybe if the prospect of a man were anywhere on the horizon. (Mensch4U's ability to feel as comfortable in a T-shirt as in a tux and JewtasticNYC's exciting life as an actuary weren't exactly getting my blood going.) Maybe if I could keep my eyes closed and spend more time receiving than giving. Whatever, I thought. I'd figure out the particulars later. I was going to do this, damn it, so I decided to address my reservations the best way I knew how: by ignoring them.

Susan and I e-mailed for about a week, and then she decided we should talk on the phone.

When she called, on a lazy Sunday afternoon, I jumped, even though I knew it was her before picking up. She'd scheduled the time for our phone date (who schedules a phone date?), but even if she hadn't, there was an urgency in the ring that told me it was her. Or maybe it just seemed that way.

But the conversation was easy. There were no awkward silences. Aside from the weird feeling in my stomach, talking to Susan was just like talking to a girlfriend. You know, a girl friend. When she let slip, "You're cute," or worse, tried to talk about "us," I shifted the topic to more platonic things.

At one point, I managed to get out, "I don't know how much of a tease I'm being." It was the only thing I'd rehearsed, the one thing I'd known I would have to say, even before the phone rang.

I was still speaking when she said, "That's OK." I could feel the period of my sentence hanging somewhere in the middle of hers. She wasn't listening to me. "Do you like more masculine or feminine women?" she asked.

Oh, Jesus. "I'm not sure what kind of women I like because I've never liked a woman before."

I had thrown in the "before" to be kind, even though I knew lying now might result in an even bigger cruelty later. What was true was that I was curious, I was intrigued, I was flattered, I was bored. But I did not know if I was interested. And wasn't that what she was really asking?

When she pressed it further, I tried to think of celebrities I found hot. Jennifer Lopez, sure. Rosie O'Donnell, not so much. Scarlett Johansson? Yes, please. Lea Delaria? Hell to the no. "Feminine, I guess."

Which led to a discussion of the photographs she had posted with her profile. "The one of you in the red top is nice," I said. I regretted it as soon as the words were out of my mouth. The red top was pretty low-cut. I could hear her smiling.

"You like the boobies, then."

Like a boy, but nicer-smelling: As a straight girl, would you switch teams for J-Lo? "You just look happy in that picture. And red's a really good color on you. " There was no fucking way I was talking about boobies.

We chatted a bit longer and hung up with a time and a place to meet. Ten minutes later, the phone rang again. "It's me," she said. Her sense of familiarity annoyed me, and the second call caught me more off-guard. Men did not hang up the phone and call back 20 minutes later. At least not men I've ever known. I suddenly understood that old joke: What do lesbians bring on a first date? A U-Haul.

"You make a person want to cancel her appointments and just keep talking to you," she said. I wouldn't have believed it if I'd read it in a book. I'd have chalked it up to melodrama if it were a line in some asinine romantic comedy.

"Oh," was all I could muster.

"Can you talk a bit more?" I was already planning on telling her not really, but then she added, "Just for like 20 minutes." It was so exact, so needy, so faux casual that I couldn't even consider saying yes.

"Look," I said, "I've really got to go. We're going to see each other in a few days." I could sense disappointment on her end, but what could I do? This woman seemed crazy! We'd never even met! Didn't she know you can't just act on every impulse you have? That you need to play the game? I shuddered. What the hell was going on here?

Susan's disappointment didn't last long because that night, around midnight, my phone rang again and we had our third conversation of the day. On the first day we'd ever talked at all. I had gotten my wish: an attentive mate who said what she meant and meant what she said. And I couldn't have been more freaked out about it.

But the truth is I enjoyed talking to her. In fact, I opened up to Susan in that third conversation more than I have with some men I've dated for months. But Susan was sensitive. She didn't spook at the first mention of imperfection, of baggage. She was, after all, a girl.

The week after our first day of phone calls passed with alarming speed. I grew increasingly panicked as our date neared. "Blow it off," one friend advised. "You're not a lesbian!" A good point. And yet, didn't I owe it to myself to see how this thing played out? I'd already come so far! Wasn't it time to live a little dangerously in homage to all the friends who were now shopping for Bugaboos and obsessing over seating arrangements? Going out with Susan wasn't something I necessarily wanted to do, but something I felt I should, to build character. I mean, going weak in the knees for someone or wanting to tear his clothes off the second you see him is nice, I guess, but it doesn't hold a candle to character, right? Right?!

Sunday arrived, and I woke up groggy. My sleep had been fitful and uneasy. I was supposed to get in touch with Susan to confirm the details of our date. I didn't. Later that day I received an e-mail from her: "Am I right in assuming you've lost interest in meeting me?"

Hot straight girl-on-girl action: Sca-Jo and N-Po (Even worse, she had accidentally sent a slightly altered draft of the message, too. I was mortified for her. I was mortified for me—how many times had I agonized over every syllable in a one-line missive to a man who probably skimmed it anyway, too distracted by ball-scratching or mirror-gazing to care?)

My response to Susan's e-mail surprised even me: "What makes you think I've lost interest?" Holy shit, I thought. I am a guy. I am a motherfucking guy. I was full-on playing with her head, and it terrified me how naturally it came, how easily and effortlessly the transition had occurred. Didn't I complain that men can never just make a plan and stick with it? That they're purposefully evasive? That they toy with our emotions for sport? What could I have been thinking?

Not much, I guess, because I strung Susan along for a week or two. I answered her phone messages with e-mails. I canceled plans at the last minute once because I got stuck at work and another time because a friend sprang last-minute birthday plans on me (a last-minute birthday?). Finally I decided to do something no man has ever done with me: I decided to come clean.

"Look," I wrote, "I'm really sorry. I never meant for this to happen or for things to get this far only to have me chicken out. I just don't think my heart is really in it. And I sort of wish it were. I'm truly sorry if I've hurt you."

And she, also being female, responded in a similarly refreshing way: with honesty, compassion and understanding: "I'm a little bummed because I thought we were connecting, but no worries, OK? Please. Call me if you ever change your mind. Goodbye, beautiful."

Her e-mailed crushed me. It made me want to write back and tell her I was wrong, that we should meet, but I didn't. The kindness was what I was attracted to. It always had been. I just couldn't get down with the boobies.

In the end, Girltown turned out to be less like an exciting vacation spot and more like a restaurant I wanted to gawk at through the windows but never actually eat in. Today when friends and I are contemplating how to proceed with men we're dating, what the best course of action is, we invoke the question WWSD — What Would Susan Do? We figure out the answer, then do the opposite. And I hate that we have to. But I guess that's the price you pay for being a straight girl.

*Names and Jdate handles have been changed.

No, no, no: A shonda.Amele,

We don't know each other, but I saw in the news today that you were "disheveled and unkempt" at your husband's court hearing. I am worried about you, mameleh. You are a Nice Jewish Girl, and your life is going down the toilet. (What do you mean she's doing well? What music nominations? But…she's missing teeth! She is bleeding through her ballet slippers! She can't even afford real street shoes! Ok, bubeleh. Sorry, sweetheart.)

My granddaughter Carla played me one of your songs on the computer. (She's very good with the computer. Such a smart girl. So she went to Boston University and not Dartmouth, like her first cousin Barry. BU is a very good school, certainly better than where her good-for-nothing cousin Lonny went, which is nowhere. His grandmother, my beloved sister Ruth, she should rest in peace.)

You, my dear, have the voice of an angel. A black angel, but an angel still. All that talent wasted on so much tsuris. Ach.

Honey, Nice Jewish Girls don't go to the drug rehab. No, no, no. (I beat my chest with each word I speak, bubeleh.) And I took it upon myself to throw an English muffin in the brook on your behalf during tashlich. You're welcome.

Listen to Carla's bubbe, Amy: she just wants what's best for you!Carla says I have to wrap it up, so listen closely to your bubbe: If you should decide to turn your life around and might one day like to be buried in a Jewish cemetery (poo poo poo, you should live a long and healthy life) and not in some shiksa garden with crosses everywhere (but I don't judge), and you'd like to remove those farshtunken tattoos, might I suggest Dr. Stuart Lerner, a lovely boy who's not so hard on the eyes. (Yes, Carla, I remember that she's married and has a male companion, but what she needs is a Nice Jewish Boy, and you got so mad that time I gave Riva Goldenblatt your phone number at the beach club to give to her grandson that I don't interfere anymore.) Stuey is a dermatology resident at Cornell Medical, and I'm sure he could help you. (He actually went to Harvard, but his hospital is affiliated with Cornell, where Carla also didn't go, though I assure you she got a good education, even if Boston University is not Ivy League.)

Your body is a temple, mameleh. (No, sweetheart, I wasn't suggesting she go to temple, though it wouldn't hurt.) Speaking of temple, we have a lovely new cantor at Sons of Israel. I'll save a seat for you, Amila. Bring a sweater (it gets cold in the sanctuary) and your appetite. The whitefish salad at the kiddush is to die for. (What
do you mean she doesn't eat?)

Love,
Carla's Bubbe