I walk past the dog, and now I’ve reached these stairs: Alice in Wonderland tunnel-types that turn awkwardly into another set, descending into the church basement. I’m here for a Purim party, a celebration and reenactment of, as Lea, my anti-Zionist Jewish host tells me, “a time we didn’t get killed as a unit.” Often, Jews will call Purim, this holiday, “topsy-turvy,” on account of how both ancient and present reality becomes inverted, how everything gets turned on its head, and how much alcohol one might consume during the festivities. The story, which tonight is set to be acted out by drag queens in the basement of this Lutheran church, retells how the Jewish Queen Esther saved her people from a villain named Haman’s plot to annihilate them in Persia.
Down the warped stairs, these two old fellas are lounging in a kind of lobby. They’re the “old Jewish super rad guys” that Lea—who’s running the Purim party—told me about. They’re Mel and Sol—not their real names, but musical stage names which come from the name of the two-person football team that Sol (not his real name, but that’s what I call him since he seems more like a Sol than does Mel) founded in high school. Sol usually played quarterback, throwing to his friend who wasn't named Mel and who was not the man now sitting next to Sol; she was a speedy receiver who could catch spirals and stay in bounds between the bricktop and the treeline. Now that I think of it, I don’t know who Mel or Sol really were, just that they weren’t really the two members of the two-person high school football team, the two names of the usual opponents of said team, or the two names of the two old Jewish musicians lying on the couches in the basement of the Lutheran church.
ILLUSTRATION BY MARIANA MERILES / COLLEGETOWN
Mel’s got these thin-rimmed circular wire frames and he’s not so sneakily taking sips out of a metal flask which he settles in his left shirt pocket. From that blue striped, oversized collared shirt, there are two top buttons undone, such that Mel’s chest is open to the ceiling, since he’s lying like a plank on the couch, propped up like a sarcophagus angled against the cushions. Mel’s feet are crossed at the ankles, and they’re clad in black sneakers with laces that slowly weave a gradient from one color of the rainbow to the next. He’s bouncing his feet to the bass drops of techno music bounding from inside the main room of the church basement, which is even harsher than the electric beats coming from the bagel shop across the street. Along with the metrical toe points, he’s twitching slightly his left hand, which is hanging, so nonchalantly that it approaches morbidly, off one shoulder of the couch.
Sol is also wearing jeans and dark sneakers, but up top, he’s got on a grey wool sweater which sits atop a blue or purple (I’m colorblind) collared shirt—which also sits upon an orange turtleneck. When the time comes for he and his band partner Mel to depart after their set, he’ll also put on a blue or purple checkered flannel shirt and a brown army cap. (It’s about 60 degrees today).
“Hey, Mr. Hotdog is here,” says Mel, gesturing to the hotdog in question, who is made of polyester.
“Don’t worry, it’s a kosher hotdog,” Mr. Hotdog assures him.
Mel and Sol were born to two Jewish mothers. Mel’s Jewish to the degree, he says, of “cum see cum sa.”
“So was Magilla Gorilla Jewish?” Mel asks Sol.
“That’s the question.”
Mr. Hotdog has been replaced by a tall boy lurking about the basement in oversized parachute pants and a worn leather jacket. Also passing by the couches and into the basement’s main room is a blond-haired country white boy in a fur trapper hat.
“I feel like I’m outside one of those famous clubs in New York City,” says Mel, who’s from Long Island, has this really sweet old voice, and is now stuffing a grease-stained bundle of parchment paper into his shirt pocket along with the silver flask: hamantaschen, the Ashkenazi Jewish pastry which satirizes the triangle-shaped hat that Haman, the Persian advisor who plotted to wipe out the Jews, is said to have worn.
“Yeah—heebie jeebies,” says Sol, who also sounds sweet, a little more nasally, slightly cartoonish, and keeps getting up from the couch periodically, putting his hands on his hips, and twisting slowly—very slowly—and stretching his lower back. “That sounds like outer space in there.”
Sol went to Cornell when a contingent of Black students occupied Willard Straight Hall. He was there for the Vietnam War protests and, subsequently, didn’t have final exams in the spring. One night, he took his parents, who were visiting from Buffalo, along with him to an SDS meeting. The students demanded to speak to the university president, and they occupied Barton Hall overnight until he came. Sol and his parents opted not to sleep on the gym floor.
“Magilla is 5’4” and 530 pounds, which is slightly large for a gorilla,” says Mel, who is reading Magilla Gorilla stats off his phone after Lea gives him the church’s WiFi password. I shouldn’t tell you it, but it’s very sweet.
Sol gets up again and outstretches his hands above his head, then hides his fingers in his pant pockets. Purim, Sol tells me: “It’s one of those good and evil kinds of things, and what I’ve been reading recently is that the Jews killed some 75,000 Persians, which,” he reflects, “is comparable to what’s going on now.” After Queen Esther saved her Jewish brethren, her people “struck at all their enemies with the sword, killing and destroying, and they did with their enemies as they pleased,” so The Megillah—the scroll, not the 1963 cartoon gorilla—goes.
At this point, it’s after 7 p.m., and Mel and Sol should have started their set by now. Sol, who was born in 1950 and in 2025 walks in short but pronounced steps, disappears into the dark purply techno pulses, through the pull- and push-apart doors of this Lutheran church’s basement main room.
“I’m the younger,” says Mel. “That’s why I’m Sol—no, Mel.” They’re both Mel and Sol, but neither is Sol nor Mel.
Mel has a perpetual, pinching smile. His mouth doesn’t completely close, perhaps because of the dimples that run from its corners up to his eyes. His fingers fidget with the screw cap of the flask, which is now nestled between his right thigh and where the central couch cushions meet in the middle.
A boy in a blue and gold Dickies shirt strolls by, his knees wearing the cuffs of billowy, rolled-up lounge pants. It’s time for Mel and Sol to enter that neon green, pink, and blue basement and take their place in front of the assembled students, under a tiny disco ball that’s hanging from the ceiling by way of packing tape wrapped around a ceiling panel.
Before Purim, Lea foretold of the event’s “chaotic assortment of decor.” They (Lea uses the pronouns they and them) went to the local reuse center and assembled decorations of string lights, synthetic vines, and paper lamps. In the back of the basement main room are “a bunch of dumbass scarves and hats and stupid shit you need at a photo booth.” Nothing was ordered online, because, “Fuck that. Fuck Amazon. They’re union busters and,” Lea tells me, “I’m like 99% sure they’re on the BDS list.” Along with the potty-mouth, Lea has this incredibly bubbly giggle, an Ashkenazi Jewish background, and a tattoo of a symbiotic sea slug called Elysia chlorotica (they took my notepad and pen and wrote the name of it) which symbolizes their commitment to mutual aid.
In between Mel and Sol’s songs on the guitar and mandolin and violin, Lea makes introductions, picks up stray trash, and greets the newcomers, among whom stands and then sits a boy clad like a leprechaun, who methodically curls each individual finger around the handle of his cane. (The St. Patty’s day darties start tomorrow.) Tonight, the crowd is mostly white, partially Jewish, and likely all progressive.
Even though Sol tells me after the performance that he feels like “the group was really with us,” from my view left of stage—and I mean the end of the long, carpeted, basement main room towards which all the lights are aimed and in which all the instruments and equipment lie—there’s a vast, gaping expanse between the two old Jewish guys and the crowd of students, and not just because the orientation of the room molds the gallery into an ovular shape instead of a semi-circle. Most students are half-listening, some are leaning across each other to whisper something or another, and one is surgically masked with their eyes down in a paper pamphlet which explains an interpretation of Purim from an anti-occupation perspective.
In the chair like Pete Seeger, strumming and speaking, Sol tells the kids a story about his old housemate’s daughter Belen, who has to go back to Mexico. Voice cracking, he wonders aloud if there’s anything he could do to help her stay. He could call his congressman, he sings, “but he's a puppet of rich guys who fund his campaign.” The students cheer after that line, but cringe as he ends most of his sentences with a Spanish word in his American accent. No more could Belen attend high school with her “buenos amigos,” or teach circus skills to “local niños.” One afternoon, she came home “with a triste expression.” Her application “ha puesto negada.” Despite the tonal hiccups, the song ends in applause.
When Sol introduces the next song, he shouts out Brooklyn and receives a holler from almost a majority of attendees. But then he drops the word “gypsy,” and in immediate response, a somber “oh” is cast. That “oh” floats towards the makeshift stage and by a conspicuous yellow banana—inner curve facing the audience—which sits, unknown since when, on the carpet in front of Sol’s foot, in front of his open mandolin case.
There’s a break in the set since Sol needs to tune his instrument. “That’s the string, man,” he says under his breath, into the mic, engrossed in the mandolin as the rainbow colored set of stringlights collapses from the pillars to the right of him and Mel. “That’s the one.”
Once the two old Jewish guys start again, there’s a flurry of muffled conversation about all kinds of things. The kids have their phones out; some are standing and talking and giggling at the opposite end of the long basement main room. Mr. Hotdog’s perfect squiggle of yellow mustard flashes through the vertical windows of the push- and pull-apart doors. He’s gone, soon to return, along with a contingent that goes and takes a smoke break outside the church along the alleyway and comes back later in the night to see the story of Purim acted out in drag.
ILLUSTRATION BY MARIANA MERILES / COLLEGETOWN
I’m trying not to take my eyes off the two old Jewish singers—Sol, who is now leaning in towards me on the couch in the lobby-looking room, and Mel, who is bent down on one knee folding a music stand and wrapping up sound cords—but a bubblegum-pink figure with a wafty tuft of silver-white fake curls is, with her block heels and Caucasian-colored stockings, towering over the old men, and beside the two guys sits an impromptu band of kids occupying another couch, emanating a discordant array of mostly bodily-made sounds. A drag queen named Tilia Cordata, who will narrate the Purim spiel, is preparing to enter that dimly lit, neon basement. Of this three-person band of students on the couches opposite Sol and Mel, one boy in white Crocs is strumming an offline electric guitar, another boy is beating a pair of wooden drum sticks on his knees, and a girl—whose ear, nose, and lip are all pierced—is looking at her phone.
“When we were young,” Sol tells me, “we thought we were gonna end war, end hunger—you know—save the environment, have racial justice.” At this point, Tilia Cordata and her fellow actors, Queen Tessential and David Blowme, have entered the main room; the two boys are still strumming and drumming cacophonously, and the girl is still on her phone. “And in many ways, things have never been worse than they are now.”
“It’s not a school night,” Mel—who works as a school crossing guard—reminds me, but still, each of these old timers would like to turn in for the night. The drag show begins as Mel and Sol—who is now wearing his fourth layer of blue or purple and orange and grey shirts—carry all their music cases home.
At first, the students are slow to, with shouts and groggers, drown out each mention of Haman, which is culturally customary for this typically unconventional Purim reenactment. Tilia Cordata, who is not Jewish, who reads the script off a clipboard, and who eyes a can of RedBull by her side, one with a thin blue straw threaded through the can’s opening, sassily tells the crowd, “That one took a minute. Pay better attention.”
Queen Tessential, who’s got on this cape sleeve dress which is skinny and black and has a sparkly gold flash of fabric under the sleeve, is doing a solo musical number to Whitney Houston’s “I’m Every Woman.” At one point, Queen Tessential throws herself down to the ground, floating a leopard print fur coat which now rests above her head as she goes down on some imaginary genitalia.
By now, Queen Esther, played by Queen Tessential, has come out to King Achashverosh as Jewish, and convinced the ruler to spare the Jews from genocide and punish Haman, played by David Blowme, for his deadly plot. Blowme, in his white corset-type top, black suit pants, and platform boots, trades off between playing the king and Haman, the latter of whom struts around the basement to Scar from The Lion King’s “Be Prepared.” Blowme, as King Achashverosh, orders himself, as Haman, hanged on the gallows on which he, as Haman, had earlier intended for himself, as Mordechai, to be hanged. But even with Haman hanged, the edict which declared genocide on the Jewish people could not be reversed, and the solution was for King Achashverosh to grant the Jews the right to self defense. “No more did they have to go like sheep to their deaths,” narrator Tilia Cordata declares.
But as the story goes, and the audience is reminded post-play by a student sporting a “Stop arming Israel” shirt, the Jews would go on to massacre 75,800 Persians—which “is pretty fucked up—really fucked up.”And this here is the mess that I, your non-Jewish, non-believing, and non-white (okay, partially white) correspondent, find myself in.
Days before this Purim drag show, I met Lea in the main dark hallway of Risley Hall, a red brick castle on Cornell’s campus which houses most of the college’s theatre kids. I asked Lea, who represents Cornell’s horizontally run Chavurah, about the other Jewish student groups on campus, the ones who weren’t anti-Zionist and weren’t hosting a drag queen rendition of how the Jews prevailed against annihilation yet again. “They fucking hate us,” Lea replied. And beyond the inter-religious political disputes, there was also the question of what message to take away from the complicated Purim story, one filled with woman-hating, Jew-hating, and Gentile-hating—all in the context of #MeToo, October 7th, and Israel's assault on Gaza—as if the world truly had been turned upside down.
And so, after I opened and read the encrypted text file of Lea’s anti-Zionist manifesto that they sent me shortly after our meeting, I stumbled across another interpretation of the Jewish cultural consciousness: an oozy, dreamy, absolutely saccharine advertisement of a luau-themed Purim party thrown by Cornell’s Center for Jewish Living. Set to The Beach Boys’ “Kokomo,” three boys in straw hats and leis and hula skirts are all shimmying and one’s doing the macarena. The clip’s filmed in that signature way in which white people know that they’re having a good laugh at something, but not someone, that they’re doing some sort of imitation but couldn’t quite put their finger on whoever else’s dresses have now just become their costumes. The words “Paradise Is Coming” bounce in and then fade out. Lea’s certainly not that optimistic.
“I have like no politics,” they told me, sitting uncomfortably on a cushioned bench along the Risley hallway. “I just hate America. I’m joking.” Lea’s laptop dons an “Abortion On Demand” sticker, their encrypted essay is 3,859 words, and on their right shoulder is imprinted a sea slug which can photosynthesize its food with the help of an altogether-nother species: algae.
ILLUSTRATION BY MARIANA MERILES / COLLEGETOWN
Our conversation descended to the root of all the world’s problems: “capitalism, colonialism, and white supremacy, imperialism, obviously fascism.” The question on Lea’s mind—Lea, who was “not super into the whole electoralism thing”—was “What do we do about it now?”
“We tried the other thing,” Lea said, explaining—as I noticed a half-eaten white meringue on the window sill behind them—that as opposed to trying to break down the master’s house with his own tools—this Purim party, and I think Lea themself, would “be this counternarrative;” they would “celebrate all the people being attacked by this current administration.” They were at odds with so much of the current world, but bore that little symbiotic sea slug, and took a bite out of the meringue, which had the texture of shriveled styrofoam.
Following the student in the “Stop Arming Israel” shirt, Lea—whose middle name is Esther and is dressed as the Queen in a red dress that’s less pink than Tilia Cordata’s—has a message for the crowd: “There’s a lot of fucked things going on right now,” they say, captivating that young audience’s attention, and alluding to some of the politics of the Jewish student community. They speak against the arrest and detention of a Palestinian student organizer at Columbia—“I also just wanted to say free Mahmoud Khalil”—and cheers break out. “Fuck that,” Lea says. “Major fuck that.” And Lea has a call to these students: “Protest authoritarianism. Fight facism. Protect trans youth.”
When I clear out of the Lutheran church, night’s fallen, and I’m leaving behind a few student bands that follow the drag show and the gaggle of young people congregating along the alleyway, exiting from the side door of St. Luke’s.
Kids are cutting through traffic and College Avenue is filled with an array of honks and shouts and constant snickering—and also a haze of unknown but collective origins which emanates from the avenue. “One tequila, one vodka, bro,” says a white boy whose friend is hitting the liquor store while he heads toward the 7/11. Lanky boys, feet on the sidewalk, backs leaned up on the storefronts, loiter in the night. The white girls in blue jeans and black or white crop-tops mosey along the sidewalk, past the piles of trash—mostly plastic cups for iced drinks—that spill from the cans and darken the grey concrete. Tilia Cordata and Queen Tessential strut from the church doors into the street, still so extravagantly powdered and dressed. Lea is emceeing the remaining bands. And Mel and Sol are at home in bed by now.