Primrose Road

The Carnivalesque Jewish holiday of Purim begins tonight, and, yes. it is a mitzvah to get drunk on Purim.

It's one of those situations where Carnival serves an ultimately conservative purpose, though, because the costumes and cookies are all about hiddenness, where we're supposed to remember that God's hand is in everything, and that even when it seems that he's not there, he's responsible for all our successes. (Note that we're always responsible for our own failures, and that we're not supposed to take failures and tragic events to mean that God is crapping on us. Impeccable logic.)

Wait, I promised you a funny Purim story, not an atheist rant.

When I was in the first grade, my Sunday school teacher used a slideshow to teach us about the story of Purim. (Yes, kinderlekh, there was no such thing as PowerPoint in 1985.) The first part of the story, as it's sanitized for children, tells of King Ahashueros banishing Queen Vashti from his Persian kingdom (what actually happens in the Megillah: he beheads her) and holding a "costume contest" for all the young women in town in order to decide who his next queen will be (in the Megillah: King A. doesn't "judge" them by their, uh, costumes). According to the bowdlerized story, the beautiful Esther was the only woman who didn't show up dressed in costume, and the king immediately fell in love.

One slide in the slideshow consisted of King Ahashueros sitting on his throne, looking out at the line of eager women hoping to be queen. Esther was amongst them, in a lovely pink dress. The woman in front of Ahashueros -- one of many who could never compete with Esther -- was dressed as a potato.

A potato.

That day, I believe we learned the following lesson: if she's going to marry a Very Important Man, a Jewish woman must never, ever look like a potato.