(Let's pretend it's 2025 because that's when cicadas will appear in New York.)
Sholem aláykhem, and I don’t mean to kvel, but I’m a glorious Brood XIV Magicicada septendecim— a seventeen-year periodical cicada, not your common annual cicada schmutz— and I tell jokes on the sidewalks outside comedy clubs.
Like, for example: A bee, a wasp, and a cicada walk into a bar. The barkeeper fills up glasses for the bee and the wasp right away. “What about me?” says the cicada. “They’re regular customers,” says the barkeep. “But you only come around every seventeen years.”
Well, I did tell jokes, when I could travel to mid-town, but a rat ate off a piece of my wing in Mayor Adams’s yard, not at Gracie Mansion, but at his property in the Bed-Stuy neighborhood of Brooklyn. Then I was stuck on a fallen leaf, waiting for the next attack. My pal, Faivish, hung out with me until he decided it was more important “for the species” to visit his girlfriend.
Boy, was I mole-kas, and I gave him a piece of my mind.
“Go. Go. Mate with your fancy lady. You know I have a broken wing. You want I should sit here alone on the ground, like a slug, like a worm, like a maggot. The tree sap shouldn’t dry up before I have a taste, you nebach! G*d forbid you should perform a mitzvah for your best friend before the rats eat him.”
Wouldn’t you know, just after Faivish left, an enormous rat came scampering my way, but I was snatched from its jaws of death by a pigeon who scooped me up, and now we’re flying toward the Poconos, preferably to a resort where I can try out my act.
Le’Chaim!
Sholem aláykhem, and I don’t mean to kvel, but I’m a glorious Brood XIV Magicicada septendecim— a seventeen-year periodical cicada, not your common annual cicada schmutz— and I tell jokes on the sidewalks outside comedy clubs.
Like, for example: A bee, a wasp, and a cicada walk into a bar. The barkeeper fills up glasses for the bee and the wasp right away. “What about me?” says the cicada. “They’re regular customers,” says the barkeep. “But you only come around every seventeen years.”
Well, I did tell jokes, when I could travel to mid-town, but a rat ate off a piece of my wing in Mayor Adams’s yard, not at Gracie Mansion, but at his property in the Bed-Stuy neighborhood of Brooklyn. Then I was stuck on a fallen leaf, waiting for the next attack. My pal, Faivish, hung out with me until he decided it was more important “for the species” to visit his girlfriend.
Boy, was I mole-kas, and I gave him a piece of my mind.
“Go. Go. Mate with your fancy lady. You know I have a broken wing. You want I should sit here alone on the ground, like a slug, like a worm, like a maggot. The tree sap shouldn’t dry up before I have a taste, you nebach! G*d forbid you should perform a mitzvah for your best friend before the rats eat him.”
Wouldn’t you know, just after Faivish left, an enormous rat came scampering my way, but I was snatched from its jaws of death by a pigeon who scooped me up, and now we’re flying toward the Poconos, preferably to a resort where I can try out my act.
Le’Chaim!