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Here is the 524th episode of the long-running radio show/podcast, Dave’s Gone By, which aired on UNC Radio, Aug. 29, 2015. Info: davesgoneby.com.
Featuring: Greeley Crimes & Old Times, The Wretched Pun of Destiny (noodles), Saturday Segues (In the News, Lewis Black), Inside Broadway, Dylan – Sooner & Later (Modern Highway)).
Host: Dave Lefkowitz
Guest: Dave’s wife Joyce
00:00:01 DAVE GOES IN w/ Joyce (school’s in, new bear, minions) 00:26:30 GREELEY CRIMES & OLD TIMES 01:02:30 DAVE GOES FURTHER IN w/ Joyce (Chicago) 01:17:30 SATURDAY SEGUE – Lewis Black 01:33:30 Sponsors 01:40:30 INSIDE BROADWAY 02:02:00 Update: The Miracle of Long Johns 02:11:30 BOB DYLAN – Sooner & Later (Modern Highway) 02:41:00 Friends 02:51:30 THE WRETCHED PUN OF DESTINY (#50) – noodles 02:53:30 Sponsors 02:56:30 SATURDAY SEGUE – In the News 03:22:30 DAVE GOES OUT
Aug. 29, 2015 Playlist: “Bar Mitzvah” (01:20:00), “Getting Old Sucks” (01:22:00) & “Birth & Death” (01:22:30; Lewis Black). “Carried Away” (01:58:30; On the Town 2015 Broadway cast). “Someday Baby” (02:16:00), “Desolation Row” (02:21:00) & “Beyond the Horizon” (02:32:30; Bob Dylan). “Finale” (02:58:30; How Now Dow Jones 1968 Bway cast). “Eyes of the Immigrant” (03:00:00; Eric Andersen). “Auf der Heide blüht ein kleines Blümelein (Erika)” (03:06:30; Tony Marshall). “Turn on the News” (03:10:00; Husker Du). “Miss September” (03:28:30; Liz Phair).
Segment aired Aug. 29, 2015 as part of the “Dave’s Gone By” radio program hosted by Dave Lefkowitz.
Please Note: Segments extracted from “Dave’s Gone By” may have music and other elements removed for timing and media re-posting considerations. For the full interview with all elements, please visit the audio of the complete original broadcast.
All content (c)2015 TotalTheater Productions. More information on Dave’s Gone By: http://www.davesgoneby.com
* 50. A woman goes into a bakery in Chinatown and asks for her usual breakfast coffee and sticky bun. “I’m sorry,” says the counter girl. “We’re out of coffee. But we have many unusual teas here. Try one?”
“Sure,” says the woman. “What’ve you got?”
“Well, we have bubble tea, rice tea, buckwheat tea, and our house blend which is made from noodles.”
“That sounds interesting,” says the woman. “How do you make it?”
“I’ll show you.” The counter girl opens a bag of tea and then pours a healthy scoop through a funnel and into a mug of boiling water.
“Delicious!” says the customer. “You should really advertise how you make this.”
“Oh, we can’t!” says the girl. “We’d get arrested.”
“Arrested? For pouring tea through a cone?”
“Yes,” says the girl. “We’d be showing Full Funnel Noodle Tea.”
Shalom Dammit! This is Rabbi Sol Solomon with a Rabbinical Reflection for the week of September 28, 2014.
You know how you can never eat only one potato chip? Or M&M? Or pound of brisket? Well, a chef at a Chinese restaurant in China dreamed up a way to keep his customers coming back for more. And more. And more. A fella named Zhang wanted to make sure hungry diners chose his noodle shop over all the others in his province, so he did what any entrepreneurial sociopath would do: he went out and bought several pound of poppy buds. That’s the stuff you make opium with—for those of you who don’t live in California or Colorado.
Anyhoo, he pounded the poppies into a powder and sprinkled it into the flour for his noodle recipe. Since opium has a narcotic, addictive effect, Zhang figured customers would start eating his entrees, develop cravings, and return for more. Considering that Chinese food automatically makes you crave more of it an hour later, Zhang seemed to have a foolproof scheme. That is, until one of his diners decided to drive home. Police made a routine traffic stop, gave the guy a breathalyzer, and lo and behold, he was high, and he be holdin’.
The poor shlub was arrested and held in prison for two weeks. All the while, he protested, “It was the noodles! It was the noodles!” You can imagine how that went over with the warden. But the customer convinced his family to go eat at the noodle shop a couple of times. Police then agreed to test the family, and—you got it—they had more poppies in `em than Dorothy, the Tin Man and all those midget eunuchs combined!
The police—or, sorry, this is China—the po-rice, allested the lestaulaunt owner and put him in jail for two weeks. Now the driver is suing the city for wrongful arrest, and the restaurant owner is saying, hey, poppy seeds were actually common in Chinese cooking before they were banned a few years ago. I guess they were poppy-lar. Heh heh heh dammit.
What I don’t get about this story is two things: aleph: why you would buy a hundred-dollar bag of drugs to sell 24 cents worth of noodles. And beth: why any restaurateur would think you need opiates to get people hooked on noodle soup. Ask any Jewish grandmother. If you’re sick, if you’re under the weather, if you’re just plain ravenous: put a bowl of chicken noodle soup in front of you, already you feel better. Just from the smell, let alone the heat, the taste, the slurpy lokshen.
Real Kosher chicken soup is its own addiction, especially with those giant matzoh balls that are heavy but light but heavy but light but heavy but light. And for those who think chicken soup is not a drug, why do you think they call it Jewish Penicillin?
Now, let me be clear: I am against any chef or anybody tampering with food by using harmful ingredients, be it hippies sharing funny brownies at Woodstock or Monsanto shpritzing everything with growth hormones and high-fructose corn syrup. But at the same time, it’s not as if we can cast the first stone. The guy who invented Coca Cola was a morphine addict who was crushing coca leaves into his wine. In the late 1800s, a local prohibition forced him to change his recipe – not to take the cocaine out, just the alcohol. However, on his own volition, he nixed the cocaine and replaced it with syrupy sugar — which, as we know from our children, has no addictive or drug-like properties whatsoever.
Nevertheless: let the story of Zhang be a lesson to anyone who wants to turn chow mein into cow-caine: desist and resist! Or, put another way, you can use your noodle, but don’t turn us into noodle users!
This has been a Rabbinical Reflection from Rabbi Sol Solomon, Temple Sons of Bitches in Great Neck, New York.
