Once I was brushing my teeth with my younger brother. He must've been 4 or 5, which makes me 8 or 9. I was swishing water in my mouth when I suddenly felt this irrisistible urge.
I spit the toothpastey water all over my brother's shirt. His shirt said "Born to Boogie" on it, I'll never forget it. He burst into tears. I was majorly busted, but I didn't feel contrite at all - it was worth it.
You just never get to do that!
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One Hanukkah I brought home some song sheets from Hebrew school with some new songs. Our family always sings a bunch of songs during candlelighting. My dad was very pleased with the new additions and added them to the list. They were copied and stapled onto the old sheets. There were no music notes, just the lyrics. They are relatively well known Hanukkah songs that most Jews know.
What I could never tell my Dad is that he sang one of the lines out of tune. Dad is a trained singer.
He just hadn't heard the song in a long time. I knew the proper way to sing it since I'd sung it in school, of course. It drove me mad.
I think it was after 2 Hanukkahs that I finally cracked. At some other time in the year, I dug out all the song sheets at my Grandmother's house. There must've been something like 40 copies. I tore off the offending songs from each set (I knew all the songs I'd brought home had to be erased in order for this to be clean) and dumped crumpled them into the trash. All of this while the adults were socializing in the other room. I was never questioned on the stuffed trashcan in my Grandmother's den.
The punchline is that it didn't make much difference. I could never have pulled off this maneuver at home. We had our own set of sheets for our family. If they disappeared, one of us kids would have to be the culprit. So we continued to sing it at home.
Add to that that we had stopped having large family Hanukkah parties, so I didn't have to endure it there anyway. I think there was one year where we got all together and there was a moment of "I thought we had copies of that for everyone?" Of course they sang it anyway, or at least my Dad did, with everyone else attempting to remember the lyrics.
He still sings it wrong. I don't cringe as much as I used to, but I still hate it.
