The rabbi & the singer unite in song and love
“I’ve never had the experience where someone you meet online looks exponentially better than his picture,” Anthony laughs.
People use photos from before Prohibition; you show up and there’s the Crypt-Keeper.
What began as a month-long cross-country online correspondence turned into a first date at a New York Mets game when Anthony, an up-and-coming opera singer from San Francisco, moved to New York City to study for two months in the summer of 2007.
From chatting online, “it was clear that Anthony was super-intelligent, creative and an artist; that he is the kind of person you want to get to know, which is why his not talking was so weird,” says Mike, who goes by “Rabbi Mike” to his students and congregants.
[...] I had a major operatic debut under my belt, and I was in love with this amazing man.
(Anthony grew up in a church-going family in Vallejo.) Hearing Yiddish in a movie set him on a new career path: becoming a singer of the language of Eastern European Jews.
“There I was, knocking on doors of white peoples’ houses, telling them who to vote for in Pennsylvania,” Anthony said.
Respectful black people don’t do that.
The pair moved to Oakland in 2012, when Mike got a job running the religious school at Danville’s Congregation Beth Chaim.
In addition to performing, Anthony teaches students pre-bar mitzvah at Berkeley’s Congregation Netivot Shalom.
Mike took Anthony on a private nighttime cruise on the San Francisco Bay in the summer of 2014, on the Hebrew date of their seventh anniversary, and proposed.
The ceremony was officiated by Rabbi Lester Bronstein — a mentor of Mike’s from New York — and his wife, Cantor Benjie Schiller, who wrote an original song for the couple about spices that are mentioned in a well-known psalm about love, the Song of Songs.
The tables were also named after the spices, and spice sachets were used to weigh down the escort cards.
Guests observed a Jewish custom of entertaining the couple with utter silliness by dancing in wigs and tutus, juggling, limbo-ing, hula-hooping and more.
A few guests had been asked to write humorous couplets, and they were read with accompaniment by local Klezmer trio Veretski Pass.
Possesses abundant creativity, and just a bissel (bit, in Yiddish) of neurosis
“We spend hours making each other laugh,” said Mike, adding, We’re both public people who don’t apologize for anything, and we live in a homophobic, anti-Semitic and racist world.
Mike wore Seymour’s Fashions; Anthony combined his own items with pieces from Gentleman’s Emporium.
Kittels (the white robes worn during traditional Jewish wedding ceremonies) from Malchut.