Stephen says, "Spit in your hand and lube up his butthole before you mount his ass.  This can't be that play that shows gay sex but doesn't address the realities of lube."  Joseph complies and starts humping Max, who is lying shirtless on the floor, his face rubbing into the ancient carpet.  I slip out quietly to find the bathroom, and pass a Yiddish choir practice on my way to the ghostly, underused toilets.

We are rehearsing my new play, "You Will Experience Silence," in a building owned by Workmen's Circle, America's oldest and classiest organization for Yiddish culture and Jewish social activism.  The map in the lobby misleadingly states that there is a "Cemetary" on the fourth floor, and I've been joking that we should visit my great grandfather there, since my family has been active in Workmen's Circle ever since they landed in America.  

My family is still active, in the sense that the older generation - the one that grew up in the labor movement of the 1920s - is still active. But my parents were never members, and never brought us to meetings.  They did, however, bring us to a Workmen's Circle Chanukah Party when I was very young and my grandmother was the Chairwoman of the Metro DC chapter.  I remember distracting myself with driedls and chocolate until an old man got up and started talking about the "real" Chanukah.  My ears perked up.  He said that the real Judah Maccabee was a tyrant - that he slaughtered many fellow Jews in his battle against the Syrian Greek empire, and that his war of revolution was followed by a civil war between the Jews themselves - a war that had more to do with power than with religious ideology or devotion to God.  

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