My nephew, a New York actor who is currently appearing in Fiddler on the Roof in Yiddish, recently posted this story on his facebook page. I loved it so much that I wanted to share it here. With his permission, I am reprinting it exactly as he wrote it, along with one of his photos of the car and tire.

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Here’s a story for you: Dorie and I decided to spend Monday, my day off from Fiddler on the Roof, at Splish Splash water park on Long Island. We take my parents’ car and leave from the Upper East Side around 9:30. About ten minutes into our drive, the car starts shaking violently. Violently enough that we pull over ON THE TRIBORO BRIDGE. Fortunately the rightmost lane was coned off. With cars whizzing by us, Dorie gets out of the car to see that our front left tire is flat. Well, not so much flat as completely shredded. (Speculation: the tire was slashed by the owner of the SUV that was parked in a tight spot behind me the night before.)

Around 10:10 — we’ve now been on the side of the bridge for more than twenty minutes — a Bridge and Tunnel Transit Authority car drives up next to us and offers to help. She calls a truck to tow us off the bridge. The truck arrives and as the guys were talking to us about what we were going to do, another truck drives by and knocks off the tow truck’s sideview mirror. We are now causing a major traffic jam. A little after 11:00 — more than an hour after we first pulled over — we finally get towed off the bridge and into Queens, where the workers are kind enough to change our garbage tire to the spare donut in our trunk. After agonizing over whether to do so and how much to give, we tried to tip them, but they refused.

Determined to get some waterpark time in, we then drive out to Riverhead at 50 mph. It being a lukewarm Monday in late August, the park was relatively empty and most of the rides had no lines. This was the most fun and least memorable part of our day.

At the end of the day, we leave the park and look for a place in Riverhead to get a new tire. We try three different places, none of which have the tire we need. Resigned to the fact that we’re going to have to drive 50 mph back to the city and I’m going to have to spend a day this week getting my parents’ car fixed, we make one last-ditch effort: Costco. Turns out they have the tire we need! And they only have one left! All is looking up … until they ask for our Costco membership card. Neither of us has a Costco membership. In fact this is only the second time I’ve ever been inside a Costco. They tell us they can’t sell us the tire without a membership. As we debate whether it’s worth it to buy a membership, a woman named Suzy Moskowitz* comes up to us and says to me “I’m sorry to interrupt, but I couldn’t help noticing you’re wearing a Fiddler on the Roof t-shirt. Have you seen the show? We’re thinking of seeing it.” I respond “I’m in it.” Her eyes light up and she calls over her husband: “Harry**! He’s in the Yiddish Fiddler on the Roof!” They see us pleading with the management and they offer to use their membership card to get our tire replaced. Not only that, they offer to let us use their card to get some Costco food while we wait (an offer I inexplicably declined). We thanked them profusely and I offered them comps to a future performance of Fiddler.

My Fiddler t-shirt saved the day!

45 minutes later we had a new tire. (As we had done with the Bridge and Tunnel guys eight hours earlier, we tried to tip the Costco guys. They declined.) As we headed home — driving at a normal speed — we were awestruck by the kindness we had encountered throughout the day. First from the Bridge and Tunnel Transit Authority who took pity on us for not knowing how to change a tire, and then from the couple at Costco and the Costco management.

Around 9:30 we arrived at my parents’ place to drop the car off and tell them the story. When I gave my mother the receipt, she noticed that the name on the Costco membership was Adelaide Levine***. Not Suzy or Harry Moskowitz.

It wasn’t even their membership.

Lessons of the day:
1. There are good people in the world.
2. Costco has everything.
3. Always wear your Fiddler swag!

*Her name was not actually Suzy Moskowitz.
**Her husband’s name was not actually Harry.
***The name was not actually Adelaide Levine.

At first I couldn’t think of any experience that would rise to the level of road rage. Annoyance with another driver who did something stupid, sure. Maybe a little cursing under my breath, or an occasional blast on my rather wimpy horn. But nothing that I would really call rage. I joked that I was going to go drive around and try to provoke someone, just to get a story. People said ha ha ha . . . no, don’t do that, it’s dangerous!

Then I remembered a scary situation where someone else’s rage actually did cause me to fear for my safety.

I have no idea at this point what I did that made the middle-aged guy in the SUV so mad. It probably wasn’t anything intentional — although I do have a temper at times, so it might have been. Whatever it was, it really pissed him off. I suddenly noticed him in my rear-view mirror, behind me and following much too closely. If I sped up, he sped up too. When I turned a corner, he was right there with me. I was fairly close to home, but I realized that I shouldn’t go home for two reasons. First, I didn’t want him to know where I lived. Second, my garage is not attached to my house, so if he wanted to hurt me, he could get me as I walked from the garage to the back door. I started driving around aimlessly, hoping he would get tired of following me, but he didn’t. This must have been before cell phones, otherwise I would have called 911, or at least called my husband, but I didn’t have those options. Finally I decided to take refuge at my synagogue, because I knew there would be people there and presumably he wouldn’t do anything stupid in front of witnesses.

I zoomed into the synagogue parking lot, which is an L shape, partly on the side of the building and partly behind it. I made a quick right turn into the behind part, parked as close as I could to the back entrance, jumped out of the car and ran inside without turning around to see if he was there. (This is a picture taken from the parking lot. The Hebrew letters, which are also bike racks, spell Shalom. As you can see, you have to cross a fairly large area to get to the door.)

I dashed into the foyer, through another doorway and into the administrative offices. Bernie Marks, an eighty-something-year-old Holocaust survivor, was sitting at the reception desk. He was my height and about my weight, probably not a match for the SUV tough guy. But still, a witness. I said, “Bernie, there’s a man chasing me!” He went to the window and said, “I don’t see anybody coming, but just wait here for a while until he goes away.” I sat with Bernie for about five minutes. Then we rounded up a couple of other people and walked out to the parking lot. There was nobody there. I quickly drove home (only a block away), hid my car in the garage in case the guy was still in the neighborhood, and went into the house.

And that was the end of that. But afterwards I was more cognizant of the impression I might be making on other drivers, no matter how annoying they were. At least for a while.

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