Sunday, September 21, 2008

Everyone Loved Molly

Molly Picon, with her geneyvishe oygen (mischievous eyes)


I love this photo of the late, great doyenne of the Yiddish theater, Molly Picon.

Often referred to as the Jewish Helen Hayes, this diminutive actress left her mark on the world.

She was born Margaret Pyekoon on Broome Street on the Lower East Side of Manhattan on February 28, 1898.

In 1903, Clara [Molly's mother] took five-year-old Margaret, dressed in red and sporting an elegant fake-fur muff, to the Bijou Theater for a contest. A drunk on the trolley demanded that she do her act then and there. She consented, concluding with an imitation of the drunk himself. Impressed, he collected pennies for her from the other passengers. At the contest, she would add to them the first-prize five-dollar gold piece and the loose change that her first legitimate audience had spontaneously tossed onstage. Margaret/Molly Picon had begun her theatrical career...

Pet Peeve

Listen, people, and listen good. If you're going to post an engagement picture/album, a l'chaim/vort picture/album on http://www.onlysimchas.com/, then please...please...please... POST PICTURES OF YOUR WEDDING TOO!

We admired you in your surprise engagement-caught-on-film pics, we admired you and your chattan/kallah in your vort pics -- why stop there?

If it's about "ayin harah," you wouldn't be posting ANY pics of you and your beloved, so don't make that claim.

The people who have the right idea are the ones who do post engagement pics, then wedding pics, then bris/simchat bat pics...we get to see the beautiful, mazeldik progress of your singlehood as it becomes couplehood as it becomes parenthood!

And listen, for people like me, it doesn't help to list your engagement or other simcha WITHOUT posting ANY PICS at all.

So if you're going to do it at all, do it right! Okay???

'Nuf said.