Maybe I’m losing my edge in observing frum folks

I love when guests come to shul in northern California because I get to observe them on my home turf, it’s like having tropical animals lost in the north pole, especially if they happen to wind up in San Jose. For multiple reasons, most folks visiting the Bay Area wind up in Palo Alto for shabbos, this may have to do with better marketing and a larger community. Palo Alto is more mainstream so I’m sure people aren’t as shocked to enter that shul as they are ours. I observe from afar and home to catch something interesting that I may write about.

I saw this young couple on Friday night and the dude looked familiar, I noticed that him and his wife both gave me the look – there’s this quick look of “holy shit is that frum satire recognition” that many folks who aren’t sure exactly what I look like give me around these parts. They didn’t come up to me so I dropped it, I kind of wanted to know the lowdown and engage in some classic black velvet yarmulke and sheitle couple Jewish geography, but I refrained, there were other frummies in town who were a bit more social so I focused my attentions on judging them.

The couple was the classic newlywed Queens couple, the guy looked like he was the type who got a hat for his bar mitzvah and never wore it since, the girl looked like the type who went to bais yaakov but didn’t consider herself typical, of course I wanted to talk to them, these were my people – not my people, but I mean the people I relish in observing and figuring out everything about them and then testing to see if I was right.

I was wrong…the male portion of the couple sat next to me at shalashudos and told me that he heard I was living out here and he had called a friends brother to see where I was, he and his wife decided that they wouldn’t say anything to me in hopes that I would write about them. Unfortunately I am over writing about random people, unless they happen to do something really whack or be really interesting, this was just a normal couple from Queens, except they live in Philly, neither lives in Queens and when the dude was in yesdhiva he went by the name Scott, possibly the first dude I have ever met named Scott who wears a black velvet yarmulke, though he wore a bobby pin which detracted from his frum level.