Ladies And Gentlemen, Please Give A Warm Round Of Applause For Haftorah Reader Jack Benny!

But it’s still unclear whether even the performance will have enough for a minyan:

Impressive, those names in the sanctuary of the little synagogue on West 47th Street in Manhattan: Joe E. Lewis and Sophie Tucker on the stained-glass windows, Jack Benny on a plaque in the rear. The names tell you why, in its golden age, this synagogue became known as the Actors’ Temple. They also tell you something about when that golden age was.

Recently — say, oh, during the last half-century — this temple, with a declining membership and a vanishing budget, has not been doing so well. So starting with an official opening night tomorrow, the Actors’ Temple, for the first time in its 89-year history, will be moonlighting as an Off Broadway theater.

. . .

The temple was a tough sell, with restrictions over and above the usual constraints of a small theater. Sets need to be flexible enough so they don’t interfere with services; food taken into the temple must be kosher; and shows must go dark on Friday evenings and Saturday mornings. (The Saturday matinee is a sore point at the temple, but sometimes you’ve got to give an inch.) Holidays are booked, too, of course.

“You can’t move Yom Kippur because you have a show on,” Mr. Kifferstein said.

Board members talked with the producers of “A Jew Grows in Brooklyn,” a nostalgic comedy that seemed like just the thing, but negotiations broke down, and that show went to the 37 Arts, an Off Broadway theater on West 37th Street.

Even If You Can Go Home Again, You Won’t Want To See What Your Crazy-Ass Mother Did

I have to say, this would make for a totally outrageous third act:

Estranged from his father, a gay Brooklyn man came home yesterday to make peace, only to make a horrifying discovery: His mother had been hiding his dad’s corpse in the family’s apartment for three years, police sources said.

. . .

Her horrific secret was exposed when her 38-year-old son, Paul Iversen, knocked on the apartment door early yesterday. He had not been home since he came out of the closet well before his dad’s death, the sources said.

“I want to see Dad,” Paul Iversen told his mom, the sources said. “I want to make everything right.”

The elderly woman — who almost never allowed anyone into her Bay Ridge apartment — opened the door, sources said. “He’s in the bedroom,” she told her son.

Paul Iversen walked through the filthy apartment and to his horror found the skeletal remains of his dad, Frank Iversen, 75, in a fetal position under a pile of bed covers and clothes, the sources said.

And here’s the kicker:

At the 68th Precinct stationhouse, Joanne Iversen told cops that she and her husband had made a pact to hide the death of whoever passed away first so the surviving spouse could continue collecting Social Security benefits.

“He died of natural causes,” she told cops, the sources said. “It was three years ago.”

Detectives questioned the woman for several hours, but released her last night without filing charges. Cops were investigating whether she illegally obtained Social Security checks since her husband’s death.

A police source said Joanne Iversen had told another estranged son she had buried her husband years ago.

Tenants in the Bay Ridge Parkway apartment building between Ridge Blvd. and Third Ave. said they noticed Frank Iversen, a quiet man who had worked as a painter, hadn’t been around in years. But his wife always told them he had moved upstate.

“I always wondered if he was dead in there,” said neighbor Bonnie King. “Frank just disappeared. There was no explanation.” Other residents said there were clues, but no one put it all together.

“There were odor issues in that apartment,” said Carole Clements, 64. “We complained a lot, but I would have never guessed there was a body inside.”

A Ticking Time Bomb Scenario That Even Alan Dershowitz Can’t Abide

The couple who survives in a 265-square-foot apartment* one-ups themselves by having a baby:

When Sara Kate Gillingham-Ryan told friends late last winter that she was pregnant, they offered the obligatory congratulations. Then they asked when she was moving.

It was assumed that she and her husband, Maxwell, would have to go somewhere else. For four years the couple shared a 265-square-foot, one-bedroom rental on Bedford Street in the West Village, an apartment so preposterously miniature it could fit neatly inside the foyer of many apartments uptown. They made it work for the two of them in part by jettisoning clothes, a television and a home office. “It never felt too small,” said Ms. Gillingham-Ryan, 31, a food writer. “It helps to keep your life well edited.”

No amount of editing, it seemed, would create enough room for a baby. But after looking at more than a dozen apartments, and weighing the benefits of more square footage against the burden of debt, they decided to stay on Bedford Street, where they pay $780 a month for rent. And they would renovate to accomplish the seemingly impossible: accommodate a baby.

. . .

“The only problem with all this is kids,” Mr. Gillingham-Ryan said one day last month while Ursula napped in the bedroom. “She’s a ticking time bomb. She’s going to need room. We know we can’t stay here for long.”

*I guess the apartment gained 15 square feet since we last read about it.

The New Knitting

I don’t know — sounds sorta self-consciously oddball to me:

A chic bar in Park Slope hosted a master class on how to mount dead animals.

Taxidermy, of course, is an activity more commonly associated with union halls upstate than with Union Hall, the bar on Union Street.

But at 5:30 pm last Saturday night, Scott Bibus, a member of the Minnesota Association of Rogue Taxidermists, sat down at a long table in the pub’s trendy basement, for once church-like in its silence.

Bibus put his scalpel to the breast of a white-feathered chicken, and sliced it down the middle, all the way to its “vent,” an industry euphemism for anus.

Then he took his latex-gloved finger and inserted it into the carcass to begin separating its delicate skin from the “inner anatomy.”

. . .

Afterwards, there was the inevitable taxidermy contest, an experience that was, arguably, even more other-worldly than the master class.

Brooklynites converged on the makeshift stage with every manner of preserved animal body.

The competing specimens included a mounted chicken skeleton called Genus Nicoleais Richias, the testicles of a dog named Merlot preserved in a jar of rubbing alcohol, an Indonesian “tringaling,” and a naturally mummified rat.

But the top prizes went to a pair of squirrel testicles mounted on a plaque, a pigeon specimen, and two gaffes — a Fiji mermaid and a Coney Island “searabbit.”

It’s Just A Matter Of Time Until We Get Indian-Scandinavian, Indian-Ghanaian And Indian-Lithuanian

I think this whole Indian-fusion thing may have gone too far:

Talk of the Town opened about a month ago, and offers the familiar flavors of India with a twist. You’ll find classic staples of Indian cooking on the menu, such as lamb vindaloo, chicken curry, and aloo gobi, as well as tandoori offerings. But Talk of the Town goes a little further than even the expansive breadth of exotic flavors that characterize India’s broad culinary palette, blending Chinese, Italian, and even Irish cooking into the menu.

If you aren’t quite in the mood for Indian cooking, Talk of the Town makes an Irish lamb stew, which is cubes of carrot and potato in mild Irish flavors. They also serve up a chicken a la Roma — chicken sauteed with Marseilles wine and topped with tomatoes and mozzarella cheese.