Update: Not Impossible!

It’s been a while since my last Pintele update, but not because I haven’t been making progress. I’m still devoting most of my discretionary time to working on Pintele, but in recent weeks progress has come in the form of very small changes to Parts 1, 2, 3, and 4; and updating and polishing the scripts for Parts 6 and 7 to get them ready to record.

You might have noticed that I just gave mini-updates on all but one of the seven chapters. I’ve decided to rerecord the entire narration for Pintele 5. I’m not changing a word of the text, but when I listen to the current assembly I feel I can do better, from a performance point of view.

Besides the narrated sections, Pintele includes scenes, sketches, and character bits. The most extended example is a three-character drama called “Death in the Catskills,” which comes at the end of Part 5. “Death in the Catskills” is almost a one-act play, and because of its length the narrated part of Pintele 5 is unusually short. So it shouldn’t take me that long to rerecord it (he said, despite being fully aware that that’s not how it works).

So here’s the plan:

In the middle of November, I’ll have the tremendous luxury of five consecutive days to work on Pintele. Veterans’ Day is Tuesday, November 11, and I’ve taken vacation days from the day job on the preceding Friday and Monday. Five long, focused workdays in a row is exactly what the project needs right now. I’m hoping that over the course of those five days I can record narration for Parts 5, 6, and 7, and then finish producing and editing all three of those. Yes! My goal is to have all seven chapters of Pintele “finished” by the wee hours of November 12. It’s ambitious but not impossible.

You know by now that I’m playing games when I put “finished” in quotes like that. What I’m hoping is that by November 12, all seven episodes will be finished enough to share with a very small inner circle. Then in the remaining evenings and weekends of November and December (including a few more well-timed holidays), I’ll make revisions based on feedback, put the finishing touches on The Pintele Haggadah, and cross the finish line of 2025 with this project really finished and ready to share with you in the new year.

Ambitious but not impossible!