Hey, man! – an eccentric guide to the Purim cast
Now it came to pass in the land of I-ran (such a frenetic place that everyone runs and no-one has time to walk) that there was such A-hush-veh-rush to get to the king’s banquet that the queen’s dress was in the Vash ti-ng (the ancient copper) and all she had on was a birthday suit.
“Off with her head!” said the king and then he needed a new queen and among the candidates the bester was Esther and the king found her, crowned her and gowned her.
Now everything was capital in Shushan but every story has a villain and his name was Hey-man because when he entered the palace he said, “Hey, man! I have to see His Maj!” (a good job it wasn’t a republic or else he would have wanted to enter the Awful Office and say, “Mister Pres, Simon Says, support the sabras, not the Hez!”).
Hey-man had ten sons and he and they played cricket so badly that they were called the Worst Helleven and were such womanisers that they often bowled a maiden over, but when Esther said, “That’s not cricket!” and her cousin Mordy Kaye was rude to Hey-man in the street, Hey-man said, “Those are hanging words!”
He tore Mordy’s tzitzit and said, “You must be a Jew… no more fringe benefits for you!”
But the king liked Mordy, who was a useful intelligence-gatherer, and he said to him, “I’m going to give you a ring!”… which he did, Persian to Persian. So he hung up on Hey-man, gave Mordy a job for the boys, told Esther to write a ganze megillah, and the Jews had nouvelle cuisine (gor nisht mit garnish).
Fun, fun – as the song says, “havah nar’ishah, rush rush rush!” It was all very Iranic – no, ironic. The Jews were sorry for the king. Such tzores so early in his reign… Poor ‘im!
