12/04/2002 - 4:21 p.m.

Luca Brasi sleeps with the fishes

We inducted a member of the Jewish Mafia into the Hall of Fame today. Sure, he was the guy who invented paper bags with handles on them, but he's still the Jewish Mafia.

Yes ladies and gentlemen, my school brought forth two inductees to the Roosevelt High School Alumni Hall of Fame and one of them was this guy, Marvin (yes, the member of the Jewish Mafia's name is Marvin). The other guy was a painter who looked like maybe he was a semi-hippie in high school.

So, Marvin was up there and the principal's reading off how fantastic he is (they didn't say he was a member of the Jewish Mafia, I'd heard about him before now- DM's most famous gangster), no mention of the paper bags though, and how we should all strive to be like him because he's a role-model and whatnot. And so then he gets up and tells all about how he got to be the way he is, and how he's a completely different person than he started out and how he'd like to thank everybody who helped him get where he is today.

Picture the Jewish Godfather. I did. He killed me: quoted the movie practically verbatim when he was talking about the importance of family.

After him was this painter who liked to draw cars and had never taken an art class at Roosevelt. He told us his whole life story. I swear, he started out with his parents meeting in Kentucky and went to the present. No point, no message, nothing even remotely funny or interesting, just extremely boring and long. He talked for 20 minutes. Marvin was starting to get antsy, you could see him wishing he could call up Morris and Harvey and get them to take care of this guy for him.

Look, I'll say here and now, I've got no problems with the Jews, not against them at all, in fact, I like Benji in spite of myself. But old Marvin was too much.

Did I mention he looked like Harvey Lipschitz (or however it's spelled) off Boston Public?