©1994, 2006, 2007

Mrs Rabinowitz: Doctor, doctor, I got a problem.

Dr Liebler: What sort of problem is it, Mrs Rabinowitz?

Mrs Rabinowitz: It’s my son, doctor. We wanted he should be a lawyer or a doctor even, but — he wants to be a goil.

Dr Liebler: (pleasantly surprised but acting shocked) He wants to be a goil — er, girl?

Mrs Rabinowitz: He wants to be a goil, already.

Dr Liebler: Well, that’s o.k. — he can still be a lawyer or a doctor.

Mrs Rabinowitz: No, no, no, doctor, you don’t understand. He wants to be a goil. He wants to be a goil! I mean, he went to Dr Goldstein to get hormones. He’s bigger than I am! He wears skoits! He looks like a cross between a goil and a boy. I — I don’t want a goy in our family!

Dr Liebler: Better than a boil —

Mrs Rabinowitz: He’s telling me about boils! I who have raised two children and their slob of a father. Like I said to my husband, Isaac I said, our son is a goy. What, you mean he got convoited?, he says. No, he don’t got convoited yet, I say. Well, how can he be a goy then, goes Isaac. Then he takes a pork pie from the refrigerator, opens up his comic book and ignores me. Isaac has all the charm of a chilblain.

Dr Liebler: (widens his eyes and lights a cigar, but says nothing)

Mrs Rabinowitz: Where did I go wrong, doctor? Am I a bad mother? Why does my son want to be a goy? Is it because I once used his sister’s diapers when he was a baby? Is it that I let him be Mary Magdalene in the school play when he was seven? Or is it because we moved to Australia?

Dr Liebler: (polishes his glasses on his tie and smiles) Certainly could be that last one.

Mrs Rabinowitz: Wipe that smile off your face! I polished his lightbulbs all through college — even though he lived in the dorm — and this is how he repays me. Sheesh!

Dr Liebler: (trying to look serious) Well, Mrs Rabinowitz, there’s not much I can do — except to offer him a good deal on hormones and surgery — better than that shark Sol Goldstein. For him —

Mrs Rabinowitz: He wants to be a goil! A goil! My son, da goil! Is that how I introduce him to my dear friend Mrs Pumpernickel? And — and he’s changed his name …

Dr Liebler: (twirling his moustache) I’m not surprised.

Mrs Rabinowitz: … we called him Irving Rabinowitz and he’d rather be —

Dr Liebler: Whoopi Goldberg?

Mrs Rabinowitz: You think you’re so funny Nathan Liebler … you know, he looks more like Barbara Streisand … No! He’d rather be Irvinga. Who ever heard of a name like that? Irvinga! All the shiksas will laugh into their peroxide. I should live … I wouldn’t have minded so much if he’d picked a sensible name like Rachel or Naomi — but, Irvinga! Oy gevald!

Dr Liebler: (coughing fit barely averted and pouring himself a tumbler of Mogen David) Mrs Rabinowitz, please contain yourself — you nearly knocked over my signed photograph of Woody Allen doing the Gaza Strip.

Mrs Rabinowitz: Listen to him. My son is going to these transy-nancy nightclubs all the time. Fancy-schmancy transy-mancy. (stops to retrieve false teeth) His friends are all trans-this and trans-that. One was crying on my shoulder because he couldn’t have a baby. He’s built like Dolly Parton. I thought, what is he going to do with those things?

Dr Liebler: Put a ring in each nipple?

Mrs Rabinowitz: You men are all the same. Interested only in one thing or rather two — or three … Oy, what can I do? Nine months in labor for that boy, slaving over a hot stove, working my fingers to the bone …

Dr Liebler: Don’t ask me, Mrs Rabinowitz, ask yourself. Ask your son even! She’s — er, he’s — heh heh — actually, I’d like to meet his friends, for, er, purely professional reasons. Um, is there anything more you can tell me?

Mrs Rabinowitz: That’s the whole shmeer.

Dr Liebler: At least he’s not claiming to be the Messiah like most of my patients.

Mrs Rabinowitz: Ha! Did Mary have these problems with Jesus?

Dr Liebler: He went up the Cross too.

Mrs Rabinowitz: So now you’re a comedian? Oy vey, I wish we’d never emigrated!

Dr Liebler: I agree. I think we must have come here so some hack writer could make a gag about King’s Cross.

Mrs Rabinowitz: Don’t confuse me more! Say what you mean and mean what you say, as my dear mother told me!

Dr Liebler: How poetic …

Mrs Rabinowitz: (proudly, and a little dreamily) Poetry! She read it and she wrote it. Irving does too. Like — ‘a nose is a nose is a nose’, for example.

Dr Liebler: (scratching on pad) He wants a nose job as well?

Mrs Rabinowitz: (disgusted) All you care about is business. That’s plain as the nose on your face.

Dr Liebler: (flaring his nostrils and grinning impishly) I nose what you mean.

Mrs Rabinowitz: Don’t be so anti-Semitic! Our accents are bad enough. Just think of my mother cold in her grave. Her son wasn’t like mine.

Dr Liebler: Didn’t he join Les Girls?

Mrs Rabinowitz: (reluctantly) O.k — o.k! So it runs in the family! So he’s got funny friends too! Unlike Irvinga — Irving — most of them are content to dress up.

Dr Liebler: I know, I’ve seen them — er, I take a scientific interest in such phenomena …

Mrs Rabinowitz: Science, he says! You know, he told us this when he was seven and you said it was a phase … now he’s thirty-four. Hell, we could have saved heaps on his bar mitzveh.

Dr Liebler: Thinking of money at a time like this? You wait till you see my bill. Anyway, not so much was known then.

Mrs Rabinowitz: Known, shmown, you didn’t know Nathan Liebler! And at least I don’t keep a fork in the sugar-bowl.

Dr Liebler: That’s a lie! I’ll litigate. It’s a tea-strainer. I’ve got a sweet tooth. But I’m surprised you didn’t notice this problem wasn’t going away.

Mrs Rabinowitz: So, am I an expert?

Dr Liebler: Am I a prophet? Besides, you’re his mother.

Mrs Rabinowitz: (raising her eyes to heaven) That’s more than I can say for his father. Nothing but boils with that man. After all, he sits round the whole day reading comic books about Billy the Yid and drinking Budweiser.

Dr Liebler: Er, I think that’s Billy the Kid …

Mrs Rabinowitz: I do everything for that kid but wipe his nose — and he wants to be a goil!

Dr Liebler: Hmmm. (aside) Whoever scribbled this is gonna get a nasty write-up in the Jewish Times. (to Mrs Rabinowitz) So is that why didn’t he come in himself?

Mrs Rabinowitz: (whispering) Shhh! He doesn’t know I’m here. He goes to some fancy ‘gender clinic’ in Sydney. Consorting with homosexuals and streetwalkers! People with rings in their noses and — what can Rabbi Cohen think? There oughta be a law against it.

Dr Liebler: Maybe there is in Israel.

Mrs Rabinowitz: I should think so. It can’t be kosher. But what good is that to me? Isaac won’t go there in case he can’t get pork pies, not to mention Billy the Yid. As for my son, he’s a vegetarian! He lives on eggs and alfalfa. He won’t even eat gefiltefisch. The little momzer. No wonder he wants to be a goil. (suddenly realising the full implications of it) A goil! He wants to be a goil!

Dr Liebler: And, er, what about his, er, sexuality?

Mrs Rabinowitz: His what?

Dr Liebler: (preening) Does his attraction to males bother you?”

Mrs Rabinowitz: Well, that’s another thing. We never could get him interested in goils, but now he wants to be one — he says he’ll become a lesbian! A lesbian — as if having one affliction ain’t enough. We already got motorcycle tracks in the hall. Thank God, apart from leather rash, our daughter at least is normal …

Dr Liebler: (disappointed) Er, Mrs Rabinowitz …

Mrs Rabinowitz: What is it?

Dr Liebler: Um, your daughter — I saw her this morning …

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