Matisya-WHO!?!

A strange phenomenon is occurring on the airwaves. An Orthodox (!) Jewish (!) Reggae (!) singer is emerging into the mainstream. All three of those adjectives are pretty incongruous with the hip MTV world. Not only is the man Orthodox, but a black hat, black long coat wearing Lubavich BT (baal teshuva) with a video on VH1! What the heck! He goes by the name of Matisyahu and I recently caught his show at my local entertainment venue. Truth be told, I don’t gravitate toward reggae music at all, but I gotta support my own! When I told my husband that Matisyahu was coming to town, he said “we’re going!”. Any chance for us to have a social life. Of course, when we tried to order tickets, we found out that it was completely SOLD OUT!! We were convinced that every Jew in town had the same idea. Oh well, another potato couch evening for us.

Luckily, friends of ours had connections and were able to get us tickets. Yay.

Now, I was looking forward to going to this concert not just to see a fellow Jew singing in the spotlight, but to also see who else would show up. I figured that it would be packed with yidden of every persuasion. I was excited. It would be like a shul function, just with a reggae twist. Yeah, right.

When the big night arrived, I got shpilkes just thinking about it. We were going to see Matisyahu, the man who was just on the Jimmy Kimmel show, the man who is crossing over from the frummie world to the Billboard charts. It just boggles the mind!

As my husband & I approached the block-long queue to get inside the show, we walked past scalpers...scalpers! Scalpers for an Orthodox Jewish event! What's next, hawking tickets for Yom Kippur (yo, man, I got two seats up in front, guaranteed for a clean slate, only $400).

We giggled (ok, I did the giggling, my husband was just stunned) when we spotted a few assorted black-hatted long-bearded men briskly walking about the place. We gave a silent nod to a few other visible frummies, as if to say, 'we all know why WE are here.'

We grinned when we saw Matisyahu's name in big letters on the marquee. He's made it. I don't know what IT is, but he made it.

More to report tomorrow...