I got an interesting lesson in profiling tonight.

By "profiling" I mean making assumptions about a person based on their clothing or behavior. For instance, seeing young, black men wearing hooded sweatshirts one might "profile" them as being criminals.

Tonight was the "big gig" at the old town school of folk music. When we did this before, in April, it was all the dance students. The carribbean people, the banghra people, the flamenco people, we were all together. But tonight it was a bunch of people playing stringed insturments plus us hip hop people.

So basically, we were performing in front of the people who are totally opposed to hip hop and everything it stands for (sampling, djs, electronic toots and beeps, drum machines, etc.) So it was not an especially warm response.

Anyway, my friend Salah is in both dance and guitar. There were no other twofers, as far as I could tell. So he danced with us (we were 1st on the running order, after us they unrolled the oriental carpet on the stage for proper folkie effect) and then he was going to perform with his guitar class. All the other dance class folks left but I hung around to be supportive and everything.

Salah grew up in Tunisia and has lived in Paris and Stockholm before coming to Chicago. Next on his list is Sao Paulo in Brazil. Anyway, he has all sorts of interesting opinions. For instance, he is impressed with the Chicago police; how very fair they are. It's safe to say that no one who has spent much time with local cops would describe them as being especially concerned with fairness. But Salah, who earns his living driving a cab, is favorably impressed.

Anyway, it's "big gig" night so all the classes are getting up and, as a class, doing a performance. This goes guitar, guitar, guitar, guitar, then, to break up the monotony, they schedule a ukulele class.

The ukulele guys play and sing a bogus Hawaiian song about a princess who is overly willing to share her papayas...it's all "P" words and mildly double entendre and the audience chuckles agreably.

"They are jews?" Salah asked me, meaning the ukulele ensemble.

This fascinates me. After I told him no, they aren't jews (like I have the foggiest idea but on principle which is to say right there, on the spot, I feel like I should vouch for their non-jew-ness since I was guessing that him declaring them to be jewish wasn't, you know, a compliment and I should speak up for them being, uh, just plain American?????) I wondered...is there something about seeing men singing corny songs with ukuleles seems, somehow, jewish?

I was into all that vaudeville stuff when I was a kid...Marx brothers, Fanny Brice, etc. And, when looking back on that, I suppose that many of those entertainers were, indeed, Jewish.

So is that something that some households learn? In Tunisia, say, seeing a corny comedian, to make it clear "He's a jew, you know." In the same way that a bigot in the U.S. might think that Nat King Cole is a very classy acting colored fellow but, at heart, nothing more than a colored fellow.

I also thought that, as far as stereotypes go, if I had to choose one for myself, I would choose "he just wants to make me laugh." Sadly, as I am not jewish but rather tennesseean, the stereotype I end up with is "doesn't he spell well?"