By Ori Nir
Haaretz (Israeli Daily), June 4, 1999

San Francisco - It sounded like a revival of Depression-era Jewish Theater, and Irwin Keller's audience was enthralled as the tall, thin tenor sang a heart-wrenching Yiddish song about an orphan struggling to survive on the streets.

But neither the tenor, nor his audience, were anything like what you might expect at a vaudeville revival. Keller, elaborately coifed, sang dressed in a tight-fitting satin skirt, balancing gingerly on his high-heeled shoes, before a mostly gay Jewish audience in the heart of San Francisco's mainstream theater district.

Welcome to Feigelah Schmeygelah, an evening of Queer Jewish Humor, the kind of show you see only in San Francisco - a comedy night conceived by hip young lesbians and gays for hip young lesbians and gays, in a town where the outrageous and outlandish is often the norm.

Keller is one of the creative forces behind the Kinsey Sicks, an A-capella quartet of drag queens - "dragapella," they call it - who brought the house down with witty parodies of well-known songs. "Don't be Happy - Worry," is their version of Bobby McFerrin's "Don't Worry, Be Happy." "Where the Goys Are," is Sicks' take on "Where the Boys Are," with lyrics like, "Where the goys are, forbidden joys are."

These nice Jewish boys - two of them are lawyers by day - were the closing act of the second annual evening of Queer Jewish Humor. Last year, the show filled a cozy 400 seat fringe theater, said organizer Lisa Geduldig, a stand-up comedienne who has been producing Jewish comedy events in San Francisco for six years. This April, Geduldig said, she sold enough tickets to almost fill the one thousand seats of the distinguished Herbst Theater, which is located just opposite the city's ornate opera hall. "Queer Jewish Humor is a big success in San Francisco, and the people who come to the shows are not necessarily queer or Jewish," said Geduldig.

Kosher Chinese
Feigelah Schmeygelah is an offshoot of the annual Kung Pao Kosher Comedy, now a San Francisco institution, which Geduldig started five years ago after performing for East Coast Jews in a Chinese restaurant. She thought the setting was funny, and decided to make it into a Christmas-eve tradition in San Francisco, "so that the Jews will not feel left out."

Her Christmas Jewish comedy night is held in a large local Chinese restaurant, over a seven-course dinner. It started five years ago with one show. "Now we have eight shows, 400 people per show, for four days around Christmas," said Geduldig.

Gay Jewish comedy - like many other things that are gay and Jewish - is a San Francisco success story. The Kinsey Sicks are a good example. The four met at a Bette Midler concert five years ago. They were the only drag queens in the audience. Following the show, a friend asked them to perform in drag at her party. Improvising, they started to sing, and found out that they were all amateur singers. "After the party we stayed up all night singing, and the group was formed," said Irwin Keller.

Something new in drag
Unlike other drag groups (there is no shortage of them in San Francisco), The Kinsey Sicks can really sing - and they do beautifully. They create charming harmonies, and never lip-synch. Unlike others, their material is intelligent, very funny, and also very Jewish, although only two of the four are Jewish.

Irwin Keller and Ben Schatz, both lawyers, are both active in organizations that advocate civil rights for gays and for AIDS patients. Schatz, who personally created two such organizations, recently quit his job as the executive director of the Gay and Lesbian Medical Association to be the Sicks' full-time manager. The four hope that this move will put them on track to national success.

Keller and Schatz write most of the material. Schatz wrote "The Macaroona," to the music of the popular Latin song, ridiculing Jewish eating habits. "Oh the latkes make your belly soft and mushy, and the sour cream goes right onto your tushie, we eat globs of gray gefilte fish not sushi, oy, macaroona," goes the song, and the audience is required to stand up and do the Jewish macarena. Together they wrote "Men Are Pigs, But Why Keep Kosher," and, for the first time on Feigelah Schmeygelah, they performed Papierossen, written in Yiddish in the 1930s by Herman Yablikoff "as a melodrama designed to wrench everything out of you," said Keller. Keller still has a recording of his great grandmother singing the song before she died in the 1950s. He speaks almost-perfect Hebrew (his partner is Israeli) and also Yiddish, which he learned on a one-year program in Jerusalem. "I thought that doing a serious song on the show would give it some depth. It gives a different value to the laughter," he said. For Keller, this song is a chance to imagine what the American Yiddish theater looked and sounded like. "I deliver it as I imagine an actor in the Yiddish theater would. I do it seriously and people receive it seriously."

The Sicks get a kick out of the upcoming drag scene in Israel. They are even exchanging e-mail messages with Bnot Pessia, Israel's television drag quartet. They dream of taking their show to the Promised Land. "We would love to do that," said Keller, "maybe there we will finally get on television.