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The holiday of purim is the silliest day of the Jewish calendar, filled with drinking, partying, dressing up in silly costumes, and (not unlike most other Jewish festivals) eating lots of food. As such, there were numerous Megillah (Book of Esther) readings and purim parties on Saturday night, and many afternoon feasts on Sunday, across the Jewish communities of Montreal.

And so, returning from a megillah reading at the Ghetto Shul (tacked on to the end of Shabbat), I arrived to a crowd of fancy-dressed people waiting for someone to read for them at Hillel. I realised that, having still not come up with a costume, I had to do something creative and quickly. So I took off my shirt and put it on back to front, and attached to it my polka-dotted blue bowtie (my always handy, most versatile fancy-dress outfit), put on my coat back-to-front, and tried walking around with my hood on… When I eventually saw how I looked, it was a pretty strange outfit, but some people appreciated it.

Within the Orthodox community there were two parties within 15 minutes walk of each other downtown: one run by the Ghetto Shul (the downtown student community), and the other by the Lighthouse/Tishters (the Montreal Cote-St-Luc student community); both promised a great time, live music and wacky costumes; the first cost $2, the other $10, so the choice was easy. And if I still felt like partying once the Ghetto Shul event had ended, I could always head to the other.

Before I got there, though, I realised that my costume would be vastly improved by having a face on the back of my head to go with the inverted shirt, but no glasses I had found would stay on. I did know, though, that there were some elastic-tied masks lying around at the Ghetto Shul, so I went there to find one, dropped in on Naomi at the library (preparing frantically for a chemistry midterm) before going up to Gerts, the on-campus bar. There, Maya took my $2 (with my back to her), and I took her photo, before going into the party.

Some of the costumes around me were neat, but little came close to Leibish and Dena’s. Both had thrown on a bit of a punk edge, Leibish covered in chains, Dena in big baggy pants. Her hair was long and streaked in copper; his was shaven to a bright blonde mohawk.

I only later got to check (by running my hand over it) that Leibish’s haircut was for real, as he was on stage with his sax when I got there. It was quite a sax-full evening: he, Jeff and Adam R each had theirs and they jammed along. At different times in the night we also had drum, bass-guitar, Blander on electric, Jordan on harmonica… And producing some great, fun music. For a short while Rabbi Eliyon Shemesh (a scarecrow for the night) visited with his guitar and a handful of Carlebach tunes.

The party was lots of fun, and there were enough people there and enough entertainment for me to not have to head for another, and so only spend $2 for entry and $3 on sharing a “pitcher” of beer. A little shmoozing, dancing, eating, drinking, photographing and the bar was ready to close up. Avraham made his way from Outremont in clown’s outfit and with unicycle under-foot soon before they did.

In the morning, there was yet another megillah reading called for 10:30 (read by Leibish) followed by brunch. In addition, I had been invited by Sigal a few weeks back to play Mordecai in a Purim spiel. She wrote a humorous script with a feminist approach that has been common recently: to make the despised queen Vashti the story’s hero, and Haman a womanising creep. And so, Vashti’s Revenge—featuring Allison as Vashti, Rebecca as Eshter, Adam as the king, Amanda as a concubine, Josh as Haman, Arié as the king’s officer—rehearsed a total of three times before showdown on Sunday. I added a couple of musical pieces to the beginning and end to put the play into the mood. (I also wanted Haman to sing Throw the Jews Down the Well but that was rejected.)

So, after everyone had grabbed their bagels, and fruit, and juice, and hamentaschen, we had everyone settle down in their megillah-listening seats, and took our positions backstage. Allison entered and introduced Megillat Vashti, before the whole cast came on to do the can-can while singing Liza Minelli’s Shushan, Shushan. My character was meant to be an absent-minded, hunch-backed, rabbinic-looking Jew who was always too busy having talmudic arguments with himself to notice anything much else around him, and whose arthritis wouldn’t permit him to bow down to Haman. Vashti spends most of the play pretending to be a man and secretly ruling the empire through Esther; Haman, the kingdom’s head sleaze, tries to come onto Esther when Achashverosh enters and spills the drinks on him. At the end, it is victory for Vashti and Esther, and so we end the play with a song. It even seems people in the audience could understand the words we were singing; this was evident from the reaction on Becca’s face when we sang the second line of the chorus (to Lifehouse’s Hanging by a Moment):

They tried to take all Persia from the crown
But now they’re strangled purple, green and brown.
They’re flailing here until we take them down,
They’re hanging by a rope here with you.

I had been afraid the play wasn’t going to turn out, but I think in the end we carried it off well, and gave the audience a great time. It was good fun to play in, too.

Even after everyone had had their fill, the leftovers were still numerous. I shlepped piles of bagels up to our kitchen, along with some bottles of juice. It seems I missed out on bringing up hamentaschen or cake, and there wouldn’t be enough people at home to get cut fruit. But there was plenty for the taking.

By the time I had gathered all that, and we had done mincha, it was almost time to do my only non-Purim thing for the day: New Earth Voices (a choir I’m in) was having an extraordinary rehearsal at 2pm. The Ghetto Shul’s Purim Extravaganza was announced for 3pm, with a megillah reading then, and I would only be stopping my singing at 4:30. Still, when I got there, the seudah (meal) hadn’t started, and people were waiting outside while the tables were being set up.

When I eventually made it inside, the whole room was decorated very colourfully and very sweetly. The tables (even the walls and ceilings) were covered with all kinds of sweet things: chocolate coins, jelly-beans, lollipops turned into crepe-paper flowers, candy-canes, shot glasses waiting for vodka… The colourful and sweet theme continued into the meal, where the corn salad was sickly sweet, and the humus had been dyed pink. I have to say I don’t find these colourings particularly appealing. I never got used to the green, yellow or purple tomato sauce I met in Israel. While others were purple and pink, my table’s bottle of water was coloured yellow and looked like oil, so most people instinctively kept away from it.

We heard a saxaphone duet—Leibish on alto and Adam R on soprano—and Leibish led an entertaining Purim quiz whose answerers were awarded shots of an expensive bottle of donated whisky. Two more prizes in large bags were available, and I answered the question just a moment after Rachel got in. But she didn’t want the prize, so she eventually managed to push it onto me and I walked away with a Smores kit.

By dessert, for whatever reason, most people had left. Dessert, though, didn’t really have a different sugar content to the rest of the meal, only in different forms: M&Ms, ice-cream and the like. A few of us left, now on a Purim/sugar high, realised we still needed to bentch (say grace after the meal), and so searched for a fun tune to shir hamaalot. We sang it to Yellow Submarine, and then had a very long and elaborate and hugely enjoyable rendition of the prayer.

Once again, I was one of the last left around, and so had pillaging rights, and liberated a bag of M&Ms, as well as all the things I had been given as mishloach manot, the Smores kit, and a few things off the tables and walls. I felt it ironic that the Megillah feels the need to specify that although the king granted the Jews to take the spoils of their attack (8:11), it also insists that when the event came, they did not (9:10, 16). Well, I did. Yum.