Mazel Tov: Celebrities' Bar and Bat Mitzvah Memories (3 page)

Provocative, groundbreaking
and
hilarious
—three words used to describe Harvey Fierstein, the man with one of the most distinctive voices in the world. The only person in the history of American theater to hold Tony Awards for acting and writing in the dramatic and musical categories, the Brooklyn native also earned his plaque on Brooklyn’s Walk of Fame through his work as a playwright, actor, and gay rights activist.

Getting his start as an actor in the 1970s, he was a part of the performance art world in New York. The camp, the drag, the experimental—Harvey pulled it all together. He was a major force in bringing the unapologetic, openly gay life to the public. In 1971, in Andy Warhol’s only theatrical production,
Pork,
Fierstein went all out in his role as an asthmatic gay cleaning woman. Fierstein has since worked on the stage in over seventy shows. His
Torch Song Trilogy,
a play and screenplay based on his life that he not only wrote, but starred in, sent his career skyrocketing. He won two Tonys for that show, one for Best Play, the other for Best Actor, and received two Drama Desk Awards, an Obie, and a Dramatists Guild Award. He was awarded another Tony when he wrote the book for the musical
La Cage aux Folles.
In 2003, he was awarded the Tony for Best Performance by a Leading Actor in a Musical for
Hairspray,
in which he wowed audiences with his performance as an endearing two-hundred-fifty-pound mother. Two years later, Harvey Fierstein was back on Broadway as Broadway’s favorite father, Tevye, in the musical
Fiddler on the Roof.

Harvey Fierstein’s work in movies has entertained audiences of all ages, again proving his tremendous range as a writer and actor in his adaptation of
Torch Song Trilogy,
in the HBO Showcase
Tidy Endings
and in the Showtime TV movie
Common Ground.
He has acted in myriad films:
Mrs. Doubtfire, Bullets Over Broadway, Death to Smoochy, Garbo Talks, The Harvest, Dr. Jekyll and Ms. Hyde, Independence Day, Kull the Conquerer, Double Platinum,
and in NBC’s
The Year Without a Santa Claus.

His distinctive gravelly voice has been heard by television audiences in an episode of
The Simpsons
, as Homer’s executive secretary, in the Academy Award–winning documentary
The Times of Harvey Milk,
which he narrated. For the HBO special
The Sissy Duckling,
Fierstein created a modem version of the well-known children’s story and was the voice of the lead role. The show won a Humanitas Award and was published as a book by Simon & Schuster.

His appearances on television include a recurring role in the sitcom
Cheers
and
Daddy’s Girls
with Dudley Moore, and in
Elmo Saves Christmas, Murder She Wrote, Miami Vice, Swellagant Elegance,
and
Those Two,
a CBS pilot.

Harvey Fierstein’s massive talents can be heard in the album
This Is Not Going to Be Pretty,
which includes stand-up comedy, dramatic monologues and music.

And when he’s not wowing audiences, you can find Harvey doing what he loves most—indulging in his passion for antiques.

HARVEY FIERSTEIN A “TORTURE” SONG TRILOGY

I was always a different kind of a boy. At preschool age I played with dolls. I had a doll carriage. I made dresses for dolls. I was a different kind of a boy. By the time I was thirteen I had skipped two grades in school so I was much less mature than the rest of the kids in my class. There’s a big difference between being thirteen years old and fifteen. But at thirteen, only a couple of months after my bar mitzvah, I would be leaving my neighborhood school in Brooklyn and heading to Manhattan to attend the High School of Art and Design. When I hit high school I suddenly exploded from a quiet insular type to a raving maniac. I came out.

The High School of Art and Design was in many ways a gay school. There were a lot of gay kids there. Male and female. Hey, it was an
art
school. Where else would we be? But even back in Bensonhurst a lot of the kids I grew up with, even the really butch ones, turned out to be gay. My mother would tell me, “Oh, I ran into So-and-so and guess what? He’s gay! What is it with you all? Was it something in the water?”

ARE YOU A RELIGIOUS PERSON?

I never really believed in God. I always found the concept of some great creator sitting around watching and judging everything every human being did was just silly. And the idea that this all-seeing, all-knowing creator could care about which building and which rituals people used to celebrate creation was the height of human self-centeredness. Anyway, all the Jewish kids I knew attended four years of Hebrew school and then on the day of their bar/ bas mitzvah, they ran as quickly as they could for the secular exit and never looked back. But I did find that religion provided a certain community and identity for me. I definitely viewed myself as Jewish, and then judged others as “tribe members” or not. And in my idealistic teen years I recognized that this sorting of people was destructive.

When I turned thirteen and it was time for my bar mitzvah, I was already looking at religion as a negative force in the world. Still, I did want a bar mitzvah because all my friends had them, and all kids just want to fit in, and I wanted that party…and so I got
that party
. The whole affair could qualify as a social disaster. My maternal grandmother, bless her soul, was not an easy lady. What is the name for those people who are totally self-involved…?

NUTS?

That’ll do. These were psychologically simpler times. As the only girl in her family, and eight brothers to care for, she seldom had her way. Forced to drop out of school to care for the family, when she finally grew up she rebelled and made
everything
about her. She had quite a flair for the dramatic. I may have her to thank for my career. Anyway, she had to be warned before the bar mitzvah that if she misbehaved by throwing a scene there would be hell to pay. Over the years she’d ruined my uncle’s wedding and several other family events so a stern warning was definitely in order. So, with that bit of family history I was bar mitzvahed at the temple on my block.

The Yeshiva of Bensonhurst stands in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, on 79th Street between 20th and 21st Avenues. The yeshiva was right down the block from my house. At the other end of the block was the JCH, the Jewish Community House. I was raised Jew-centric. When it came to the holidays I was very jealous that the Christian kids had Christmas trees and all the lights. I wanted to do something fun like that. But Jewish tradition frowned on such goyish displays.

HEY HARVEY, WE DO HAVE PURIM TO CELEBRATE AND YOU GET TO EAT ALL THE PRUNE HAMANTASCHEN YOU WANT.

Yes, and the next morning everyone has a good bowel movement, and that, to a Jew, is a celebration.

So what I did was, I took Glass Wax—remember that pink stuff, that glass cleaner? I took that and food coloring and I mixed up some colored paint and I covered our front windows with Hanukkah designs, lighting them from behind with lamps. This was my own rendition of stained-glass windows. Our rabbi, Rabbi Scharffman, lived farther up the block, so he had to walk by our house on his way to temple every day. Apparently, there was a very serious debate concerning my windows. Several people complained to the temple that this is not the Jewish way. But the rabbi actually stood up for me. He told the people that this was my personal expression of faith and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with it. Chagall had just created the windows in the Hadassah Hospital. They were a big thing back then. So he compared my work to the Hadassah windows by Chagall and quelled the controversy. Only I knew there was a core difference between those graphic expressions. Chagall was making art and money. I was making pretty!

SO YOU ALWAYS EXPRESSED YOURSELF. BUT BACK TO YOUR WACKY GRANDMOTHER…. I’M ALMOST AFRAID TO ASK: WHAT DID SHE DO AT YOUR BAR MITZVAH?

So there we are at the temple. And this may be hard for you to imagine, but I had a beautiful soprano voice. Before my voice changed, and it had not changed when I was thirteen, I performed with a professional men’s choir that sang on high holy days. I was a boy soprano. I had one of those voices. In old Italy they would have chopped my balls off and I would’ve been a castrato. Anyway, I was looking forward to singing my haftarah, which I’d mastered beautifully. Before I begin singing I get up on the altar. All of a sudden there’s all this commotion in the women’s section of the temple. Remember that women and men do not sit together in a temple. So there’s all of this ruckus and people running back and forth and I’m up on the altar doing my thing while trying to figure out what the fuss is, but of course you can’t stop, you just go on. Well, it turned out that my grandmother was faking a heart attack in the middle of my bar mitzvah. “Oh my God, I can’t breathe!” she cried. “The pain! The pain!” The ambulance arrived, sirens blaring. I’m trying to outsing the to-do while they carried her off to the hospital, where of course they found absolutely nothing wrong. But my mother, in retribution, had her admitted to the hospital for observation. And so concluded the sacred portion of my bar mitzvah.

HOW DID YOU RECOVER FROM THAT? IT COULDN’T HAVE BEEN MUCH OF A CELEBRATION.

Don’t ask, but we still partied on. If I remember correctly, it was on Eastern Parkway. My mother’s friend Shirley was the caterer. My mother is the social queen of the world. She was president of Hadassah for many years. So she and Shirley arranged the whole thing and we had it there on Eastern Parkway in Flatbush. The highlight was that I got to wear a red and black tuxedo. The fabric had sheen to it. It was iridescent. It was hideous. Gaudy as all get-out. Just horrid. I loved it. And then, I fought to make sure that among the other music the band would play, besides all the usual “Alley Cat” and hora stuff, they would play one or two Rolling Stones songs. I was a huge Stones fan. I couldn’t get them to play Bob Dylan or Buffy Sainte-Marie, I was already entering my protest-song period, but I did manage to get them to do a couple Rolling Stones songs. And we all danced. And I have eight-millimeter movies to prove it. Silent films were the DVDs of the day.

The highlight of the film is an inordinate amount of footage of Sam Nudleman’s wife, Margie, who got SOOO drunk…. This was a rather zaftig woman in her seventies or eighties who got up on the dinner table in a green iridescent dress, and danced the hoochie-coochie rubbing herself all over. I mean, you would swear you were watching an age-appropriate stripper for Hugh Hefner’s birthday party. Her husband, Sam, kept getting her off the table and she kept getting back up. He just couldn’t keep a good woman down.

Meanwhile my poor mother had to go out every hour or so to make sure her mother was still alive, which of course she was, and screaming, “I WANT TO GO TO THE BAR MITZVAH!”

So, all in all, it was a successful affair. But I didn’t feel it was the beginning of anything—I really felt it was the end of childhood. It was June. School was over, and I was going to go on to high school. And because I was going to go to a special school in Manhattan, I was leaving most of my friends. I did manage to hang on to one friend, Philomena. Because we were both interested in art we continued on to high school and even college together. So we’ve been friends from kindergarten right to today. But I knew I was leaving everybody else. My childhood friends were people who, in many cases, still hadn’t been to Manhattan. Brooklyn was an insular life for them.

NOW ABOUT THE EXPRESSION “TODAY I’M A MAN.” WELL?

I wasn’t feeling it. I felt an end. I felt Hebrew school, Saturday morning prayers, the JCH, watching my mother’s Friday night mah-jongg games, going for Sunday bagels with my father, listening to my brother’s band practice down in the basement—this was no longer my life. I felt removed from the relatives, my friends. I thought it was the end of my life in Brooklyn, even though I went on to live in Park Slope, Brooklyn, for many years. And I definitely felt this was the end of my pretending to believe in the God of my father.

MANY SAY THAT THE CELEBRATION IS SO IMPORTANT AND SO SPECIAL. BUT IN SOME CASES THERE ARE THOSE WHO FIND IT A LITTLE OVER-THE-TOP. WHICH WAY DO YOU LEAN?

People have price priorities, if you know what I mean. My brother is a food and wine connoisseur and will spend money on those things. My mother thinks travel is a worthy place to spend. I prefer shopping for folk art. Still, there is always money, no matter how hard times are, to celebrate family and life’s milestones. Can these celebrations get out of hand? Sure. But how many times does a child get bar/bas mitzvahed?

YOU’RE SUCH A CONTROL FREAK. I’M ASSUMING YOU WERE INVOLVED IN THE PLANNING OF YOUR BAR MITZVAH?

Like I said, I was one of those kids—I’m sure the choice of those tuxedos somehow fell on me. And I made sure there were matching matchboxes and table linens and yarmulkes. After all, from that day forth, when the yarmulkes come out for Passover, you know just by the color and fabric whose wedding or bar mitzvah each came from. These are the important things!

DID YOU HAVE ANY TROUBLE LEARNING THE HEBREW PORTION?