My Happiest Moment as a Fannish Jew (Jewish Fan?)

[lomedet]

My squee for this was more intense than my squee for just about anything ever, and I wasn't even properly in fandom yet.

When it aired, the Sports Night episode April Is The Cruelest Month made my heart absolutely explode with joy, for the following reasons

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[mofic]

You know, with the surprise this comment engendered, I started wondering if I hallucinated the whole thing. I certainly have not seen that particular episode since childhood. And did people even have adult bar mitzvahs in the 1960s? As I remembered it, it wasn't a kind of institutionalized thing the way a lot of congregations do it now, but Buddy just always feeling bad about not having had a bar mitzvah and deciding on his own to do it as an adult. So did my feverish brain make the whole thing up, based on adult bnai mitzvah I've been to? No!

I found a bunch of references to that episode on the 'net, including the info that Morey Amsterdam had never had a bar mitzvah and his regret about that was the inspiration for the episode. A description of the show on the PBS website says, in part, "In a 1966 episode entitled "Buddy Sorrell, Man and Boy," Buddy is suspected of cheating on his wife. When confronted, he announces that he has secretly been preparing for his own bar mitzvah. The episode marked the first time in TV history that a series regular was bar mitzvahed onscreen -- and used a real cantor!"

The whole description of the series is worth reading. It's at http://www.pbs.org/hollywoodpresents/gingame/dvd/index.html