Chicken Soup for the Renegade Soul

It's raining and hailing outside and I'm here listening to old Lenny Bruce routines and sipping chicken soup. The house is very clean - tomorrow my subletter is moving in, then Saturday night Itka and I are going to take over her apartment in Paris for a month.

Paris has a liberating effect on my spirit and God only knows what will happen there. Right now liberty is on my mind, this Lenny Bruce guy, a man who was too free for his time so they had to keep handcuffing him, what a disaster.

I had an encounter with two other free spirits this week. The Berliner Ensabmle came to town with its production of the Threepenny Opera. Brecht was too free for his own good and too socially aware, so he teathered himself up in post war DDR. Weill wouldn't hear of it. Even before the war he split up from Brecht, saying he couldn't compose music to Communist manifestos. Still, while they were together, their work was truly free and balanced in its freedom. it was all about freedom: first and foremost - freedom from the most hidden prison walls that surround us, those of materialism and the bourgeois order.

"What's a thief's ladder next to a stock share?" asks Mack the Knife on the scaffold, "What's robbing a bank next to founding a bank?" We're leaving for Paris with nearly no money. The current crisis, bourne of greed, is hitting Israel and everywhere else quite hard. This is precisely the time to break loose, hitchhike a bit, eat a "demi-baguette", ramble around looking for adventure and grow intensely richer.