War, What Is It Good For? Answer: Paying Jessica Simpson To Sing At Your Kid’s Super Sweet Bar Mitzvah 38562

Although we can???t always shake the nasty habit of writing in the royal we, occasionally one of our editors decides to shake off the cloak of anonymity to write a short, pithy statement long, rambling diatribe about a topic of their choice. Today, Debbie Newman is that editor.

Last week, we learned that “Body Armor King” David Brooks siphoned over $200 million in company pension funds to support his “lavish lifestyle,” including a staggering $10 million to pay for what his daughter’s friends (despite since drifting to rival mean-girl cliques) still uniformly refer to as the “most awesome Bat Mitzvah EVER.” Today, comes reassuring evidence that Brooks loves his two over-privileged children equally. His son’s Jewish rite-of-passage reportedly broke the bank at over half million dollars.

And that was just to pay for shiksa goddess Jessica Simpson’s off-key rendition of “Happy Birthday.”

Allow me, for a moment, a brief stroll down memory lane, as we travel back in time to the not particularly noteworthy year of 1995. The day of my own moderately inexpensive Bat Mitzvah, things were far from picture perfect. For starters, it was the same weekend as another more popular girl’s. Who’d already had that crazy karaoke video thing! And neon-colored rave sticks! And those super-cool t-shirts that said “I had a ball at so-and-so’s Bat Mitzvah!” I was dead in the water.

Meanwhile, other more serious problems quickly arose. An awful, chubby girl was wearing the exact same dress as I was! Never mind that, in retrospect, the dress itself (navy blue with white polka-dots) was a veritable fashion abortion, and that the true embarrassment was that either of us ever thought it remotely chic. Had this been an MTV reality show, I’d most likely have reacted by bursting into tears, changing into one of my eleven backup gowns and demanding that the offending guest be immediately removed from the premises by my large, refrigerator-shaped security detail. Instead, I vaguely recall storming up to the thoughtless girl, looking her straight in the polka-dots, and hissing, “Not cool!”

But somehow, in the end, everything worked out alright. Everyone happily signed the giant, poster-sized picture of myself (taken, according to custom, during my “awkward phase”) and wrote eloquent expressions of their monumental joy like “Congrats!” and “This rulz! But where’s the video karaoke??”

And even though the professional dancers showed up two hours late (causing the coordinationally challenged Jewy preteens to huddle in same-sex groups until after the boring/obligatory candle-lighting ceremony) the allure of the blaring Ace of Base music eventually proved too much to resist and by the end of the night, everyone was laughing, waving their glow-sticks and swaying arrhythmically to “That’s What Friends Are For.”