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In This Issue

• Jem and the Holograms Suck Major Holo-Ass
• Students Get Involved, Eat Pizza
• Kids Aren't Worth It
• Can You Tell Me How To Get, How to Get to HIV
• Corporation Brightens Otherwise Bleak Childhood
• B'nai Mitzvot of Yore
• Cap'n Planet Saves World, Gouges You
• Bad Street Brawler Jerks Off Crime Off the Streets
• Science Proves America's Youth Turning Japanese
• On the Glorious Afterschool Special
• Chicken Soup for the Athletically Inept Soul
• A Researched Dildography
• Rider Strong Gets Stalked, Interviewed, Married
• Furry is the Way to Be

Grab your old pair of Payless dress shoes and prepare to dance the horah down memory lane to a time when weekends were not about throwing up on Broadway at 3 AM after an evening at a freshman-infested frat party. Instead, do you remember those seventh grade bar/bat mitzvahs, where every weekend was a social fest for all pubescent adolescents?

Now, for those yarmulke-wearing, long-skirt-sporting, kosher-eating conservative Jews out there, you won't have these memories because I doubt your b'nai mitzvot were bitchin' nights of flashing lights, pop music, and DJs that gave out enough crap to clothe a small village. To make it easier for you, let me put it into context: just think of this article as the population of Reform Jews in America, and pretend that it doesn't exist.

For Reform Jews, the b'nai mitzvot festivities always began with the forgettable temple service. The kid of honor would get up on the bimah...blah, blah, blah. Read from the Torah...yadda, yadda, yadda. The nostalgic mom would be in tears trying to give a speech about how proud she was, (the same mom that could have been witnessed two hours ealier screaming at the kid to "get [his/her] little Jewish ass out of the house and into the mini van because [he/she] can't be late for services"). There's a final song to close the service and it's over. Now who really remembers this part? Let's be honest. It's all about gettin' down with your bad Jewish self at the after party! Ah yeah, break out the Maneshevitz yo, ‘cause its time to PARTÉ!

These after parties of today are more than a couple of tables and a dance floor. They're thematic extravaganzas. There's the candy theme, the car theme, the television theme, the sports theme, the time machine theme, the board game theme, the Hollywood theme. You knew the kid was a dork when he chose something like archery as his theme. However, if you've seen one theme, you've seen them all.

Then there are enough people yelling "Mazel Tov!" after the service to make anybody's head spin. Your table assignment can make or break your bar/bat mitzvah experience. Similar to lunch at school, the table is self-defining. You can either be placed with the kid of honor and all of his popular friends, or at the table with the third cousins and distant friend rejects.

Then the DJ starts his spiel and won't shut up and let you eat until he gets every single person on the dance floor to participate in the electric slide, including eighty-five-year-old Bubbie with two hip replacements. Now tell me this: how can a bunch of white people who can barely keep up with the YMCA dance to the bumpin' beat of electric slide music? Yet this is what the New Kids on the Block look-a-like DJs are booked two years in advance for.

Then the adults are left to eat as the kids rush the dance floor to take it over for the rest of the night. The DJ, with the help of his mute female assistant with bodacious ta-tas, gives out the hats, noise makers, necklaces and all that good stuff that the kids cannot possibly not take home or ever throw away. The kids are wearing so much crap that when the clock strikes twelve you can't tell Sara from Rachael or Adam from Eli. It's a mess. By the end of the night, it's just a bunch of deranged midgets stumbling around in inflatable shoes, giant sunglasses and Mardi Gras beads, playing plastic instruments and still riding out that artificial bar/bat mitzvah after party high.

And all for what? To honor a kid for crossing the proverbial threshold into adulthood? Hell no! For those that attended, it was all about the party. For the kid of the hour, it was all about the Benjamins. What would your bar/bat mitzvah have been without a pile of sweaty checks to roll around in like the dog that you are at the end of the night? Then you thanked your lucky stars that you were a thirteen-year-old Jew, hit the sack, and dreamt about the next weekend when you got to do it all over again for somebody else.