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Not one fucking chocolate bunny. We do have eggs, except they’re hard-boiled and served in salted water. My mouth is watering as I type this.
    Every year at the lengthy Seder service, we ask the four questions. Why is this night different from all other nights? And it’s not: it’s ten-thirty and we still haven’t eaten! Two hours in and we’re still suffering and still lost for forty years. How is that possible? Forty years? I never figured it out until I drove with my grandparents.
    “Make a left.”
    “No, it’s a right.”
    “What did the guy say?”
    “I don’t know, I thought you were listening.”
    “I’m not the driver, the driver should listen.”
    So, we wandered in the desert for forty years. And when we did get to the Promised Land, we claimed the only place in the Middle East that doesn’t have a drop of oil under it. So much for Jews being the chosen people. You can almost see God and his staff laughing at the water cooler.
    But the bottom line is, I want to reconnect with God, I want something to hold on to because I want to believe there is something better, something after this. And I hope there is. After all my disillusionment, I want to believe. I’m just afraid that after I die, I’ll get to the pearly gates and God will say to me, “Billy Crystal.”
    “Yes, God.”
    “Come here,” he’ll say.
    I’ll make my way over.
    All the people of my life who have gone before me will be assembled, watching.
    God will lean in close, put his almighty hands on my shoulders, and with an angelic look he’ll whisper, “Count to ten, turn around, kiss your parents and grandparents, and come back onstage … and never discuss what I just told you.”
     
     

 
    My Twenties
    Three years after I met her, Janice Goldfinger (she heard all the jokes) and I were parked in the driveway of her family’s house. As we finished listening to “Cherish” by the Association in her secondhand Chevy Impala, Janice said, “So we should get married.” It wasn’t the big, down-on-one-knee romantic event I’d been starting to contemplate, but as I’ve come to know over all these years, when Janice wants to do something, she does it. So basically, she asked me. As soon as she said it, I said, “Of course we should, I love you.” I was twenty-one; she was twenty.
    As I was about to go into her house and ask her father for her hand and the rest of her, here’s what my scorecard looked like: It was 1969 and Vietnam was raging, I still had a semester to go at NYU, and I really didn’t know what I was going to do when I graduated. Otherwise, things were perfect. The one thing I did know was that I wanted to spend my life with Janice. I didn’t have any money for a ring, so my mom graciously gave us her own cherished engagement ring, and we put the small diamond into a new setting and I gave it to Janice under the statue of George M. Cohan in Times Square. Corny? You bet. It still wasn’t that “Oh my God” moment, but to this day every time we pass the statue we smile and hold hands, and we feel a lot better about ourselves than the people who got engaged under the statue of Joe Paterno at Penn State.
    I was a film and television directing major at NYU’s School of the Arts (it had not yet been “Tisched”). Not sure why I didn’t audition for the acting program. Maybe I thought if the acting thing didn’t work out, at least I’d have something solid to fall back on. I’d come to NYU after two great years at Nassau Community College, where the theater program had been my home. I acted in plays and musicals, and I directed as well. I did stock in the summers, and this put an end to my baseball career.
    In the film program at NYU, my fellow students were kids like Oliver Stone and Christopher Guest, and one of my film professors was a bearded, long-haired young genius named Marty Scorsese. An intense guy, he taught a production class and a history of film class. His passion for making movies was