By Donald H. Harrison

SAN DIEGO, Calif.—Danny Maseng not only sings the story of his life on-stage, he tells it. The title of  his one-man show, Wasting Time With Harry Davidowitz, is misleading, but is nevertheless a key to what the story is about.

Davidowitz was Maseng's maternal grandfather, a Chasid who often counseled him "don't waste time."  Like so many youth, this was advice that Maseng, for the most part, ignored, but at least he never forgot.

We meet the Davidowitz of Maseng's memory at the regular Friday night Shabbat dinner, for which Danny as a child always had to dress in his finest clothes. Why? he would ask his grandfather. Why do people dress up this way for dinner?  How else would you dress for a wedding, the grandfather replied. Every Shabbat the Jewish people remarry the Shabbat bride.  

As a little boy,  Maseng wasn't so certain he wanted to marry someone he couldn't see.

When people return home from synagogue on Friday night, his grandfather further instructed, they are accompanied by two angels.  These angels have an important mission, to make certain you don't waste God's time.

Myla Wingard & Danny Maseng

Much later in his life, Maseng was dating a non-Jewish woman who wanted to convert. To discourage her, he took her to the most Orthodox rabbi he could find in the Los Angeles area.  The rabbi was inspirational.  He told of his own grandfather who slept only two hours a day, so he could spend the rest of his time studying Torah.  His father slept four hours, devoting the balance of the day for the same purpose.  But the rabbi expressed grief that he himself can not seem to function without six hours sleep.  So much time of God's time wasted!

There were other recurring themes in Maseng's story, which had been an off-Broadway one-man show, and which on Sunday, May 27, was reprised as part of the Jewish Music Festival at the Lawrence Family JCC.
There was, for example, the story of the young Jew who was at a man's home for dinner in the middle of winter.  He excused himself to tend to his horse, who was outside in the snow.  "I'll keep the soup warm for you," said his host.  

Alas, the young Jew was grabbed by Cossacks and impressed into the czar's army—an "enlistment" that could last a lifetime. There was no Yiddishkeit in the czar's army, far from it.  Kosher?  There was no such thing as kosher food in the Czar's Army.  Prayers? Most of them were forgotten as the years went by.  One night, 40 years after his abduction, the Jew was lost in a blizzard.  But he saw a tiny light ahead, and crawled toward it.  It was a cottage deep in the wood.  He knocked on the door of what turned out to be an old Jew's home.  Why does it look familiar? he wondered.  "I told you I'd keep the soup warm," his host said in greeting.

Although Maseng strayed from Judaism—first as a rock-singing, teenage acid head runaway in Eilat, later as a student of Zen Buddhism—his religion and culture kept the soup warm.  Maseng eventually found his way back and he is a popular scholar in residence and guest lecturer on Jewish music and the arts.

Maseng served as artistic director at the Brandeis-Bardin Institute in the Simi Valley, north of Los Angeles.  Likewise, Myla Wingard has served over the years in a variety of musical and teaching positions at Brandeis Bardin, which operates a variety of Jewish cultural immersion programs for groups ranging in age levels from campers to university students to elders.  

Myla Wingard is the daughter of Eileen Wingard, one of the organizers of the San Diego Jewish Music Festival and the woman who introduced Maseng at his concert-lecture.