Pesach with the First-years!

On Tuesday, Amanda invited me to her seder/party in a dorm room. Sabrina was gonna be there, plus some other fun people (though I didn't know who yet) so it already sounded better than JSU's seder. I was very excited! In fact, this invitation made my week. The only thing lacking in these first-years' seder was wine, and hey, what are upperclassmen friends for?

So I went to Putnam on Wednesday morning and bought my first ever legal Pesach wine! It was so easy! I just walked in and asked, "Do you have kosher wines?" And this cute salesperson showed me everything they had. Apparently they were almost sold out, because there are Jews in Saratoga. Hm. I got one bottle of red and one bottle of white, showed the guy my id, and he bagged the wines for me. Amazed, I texted Oli to say something like: "I just bought my 1st legal Pesach wine! It reminds me of how we got wine last year at Pesach." Which, naturally, had involved getting Aimee the Butch, who we'd randomly met at the Transforming Feminism Conference, to buy it for us.

I spent the rest of my day printing, cutting up, pasting, Xeroxing and binding eight copies of the Love and Justice in times of War Haggadah Zine! For some reason the pdf you can download and print is not formatted correctly for actually binding into booklet form, so I had to reconstitute things a bit.



Ezra hung out with me in the studio for a while as I pounded nails through paper and string through holes. We also ran into Gabby, which was a nice surprise. By the time 8 pm rolled around, I had everything but the corkscrew, which I had to borrow from Hope. I even had my knit kippa, and I'd brought an extra one. At first Max wore it, but he left and had to pass it off to someone else. I'm not sure if Max dislikes me, or if I just don't understand his sense of humor. Maybe both.

Anyhow, the seder was done in just under 2 hours, including the meal! (Of course, the shulchan orech consisted of: matzah ball soup, gefilte fish, pickles, and kugel. That's it.) My only regret: I forgot my YIDcore CD.

The best part was that everyone had so much fun with this haggadah, they all kept their copies. I'm not sure how many of the organizer/activist jokes people got, but whatever. We skipped all the potentially controversial things, particularly the contemporary plagues section. But hey, this seder was still awesome. People were totally into it. And these kids remind me a lot of my first-year-of-college group of friends. For example, they're not prudes, but they don't really drink.

Thank you to Amanda for organizing such a fantastic seder/party, and to everyone who was there, who read and drank and sang and participated.