Routine, 2008
In Routine, I enact a comedian that was once familiar to the stages of New York’s “Borscht Belt” region. In between delivering a barrage of conventionally sexist and self-deprecating jokes, I plunge my face and body into a 25-gallon tub of borscht. The image of my crimson face emerging from the tub is as arresting as the blackface worn by Al Jolson, Eddie Cantor, and others. The beet-based soup, a staple of Jews who frequented the Catskills’ colonies, became the material that accumulated and built a new mask. Rather than masquerading as a black minstrel, I use the crimson colored borscht to assert a more truthful legacy – one that cannot be erased; one that is instead located in my African-American and Jewish body.
In Routine, I enact a comedian that was once familiar to the stages of New York’s “Borscht Belt” region. In between delivering a barrage of conventionally sexist and self-deprecating jokes, I plunge my face and body into a 25-gallon tub of borscht. The image of my crimson face emerging from the tub is as arresting as the blackface worn by Al Jolson, Eddie Cantor, and others. The beet-based soup, a staple of Jews who frequented the Catskills’ colonies, became the material that accumulated and built a new mask. Rather than masquerading as a black minstrel, I use the crimson colored borscht to assert a more truthful legacy – one that cannot be erased; one that is instead located in my African-American and Jewish body.
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