What would you do if you had $18,000 to burn?

We should all have such problems.

In case you were wondering, yes, that was me in the Oorah catalog this year, posing with a lot of money. And no, I didn’t just submit a picture on my own and say, “I don’t want to give you money, but here’s a picture of me and my money if it helps promote your catalog.” Oorah called me.

During the summer, Oorah contacted me and said that they were going to have celebrities, and possibly their kids, pose with some of their auction prizes so they could run those pictures in their catalog with no captions or anything that let you know which celebrity you’re looking at.

As I see it, I’m not even a real celebrity. I’m an introvert who sits in my living room and isn’t sure what to say when people on the street tell me they like my writing.

So I asked, “Do I have to come down to you, or are you going to come here?” And they said, “Just take the picture yourself.” And I said, “But I don’t have the prizes. Which prize do you want me to pose with?” And they said, “One of the money prizes.”

So I said, “Fine. Can you send me the money?”

And a week later, I got an envelope in the mail containing over $18,000 in cold, hard, fake cash.

Oh, well. I tried.

Now before you get up in arms, Oorah is not printing counterfeit money. I think they bought this. But I know for a fact that it was fake money, because I did all the tests. Also, it said it was from the “Vnited States.”

Vnited. That shows a lot of creativity. What about the Wnited States, at least? Maybe that was already taken by another brand. This is the off-brand off-brand money. It’s not even the regular off-brand money.

And that wasn’t the only difference between that and real money. For example, these were signed by the “Secratary of the Tresuer.” I’m not sure if this typo is on purpose, or if they’re not paying for a proofreader for their fake money.

But then the question was, what should I be doing in the picture? I couldn’t just fan the money out and drool over it like almost everyone else in the book who posed with cash. I had to do something unique. As a comedian, people judge your worth by how funny you are doing everyday things. So the question was, how do I show the readers that by entering this raffle, they’ll win so much money that they won’t know what to do with it?

I couldn’t even do something where I was surrounded by stacks of cash, because they sent me six small stacks. One thing about being an adult is that you slowly come to realize that $18,000 isn’t a lot of money, as far as actual pieces of paper.

So I hatched this idea that incorporated origami, which is an ancient Japanese word meaning “the art of wasting time in class.” My idea was that we could take a picture of me surrounded by bills folded into all sorts of things to illustrate the idea that I literally have no idea what to do with so much money.

And this is how my kids and I spent the last week of our summer vacation.

Unfortunately, I didn’t really account for how long it takes to fold all those bills. We tried making all these increasingly cool sculptures, until we realized that the more we folded a piece of paper, the smaller it ended up being. This is pretty obvious in hindsight, but we needed the projects as big as they could be to take up room on the table. The longer something took to make, the less room it took up. Time is money. The more time, the smaller the money. That’s what the expression means, right?

It was about then that it occurred to me that folding money in front of an open window all day wasn’t a great idea. Luckily, everyone in the house was up late that night anyway, because our dining-room air conditioner died, and then while we were replacing it, all the plaster from the wall fell down, and this was the night before we were having Shabbos guests for my nephew’s bar mitzvah. But that’s a topic for like three other articles.

But finally, we were ready to take our picture. We scattered cash on the table in front of us and the bookshelves behind us. We decided to do it in front of a bookcase for three reasons:

1. So I could put origami behind me at various levels,

2. To advertise the books I’ve written. So in other words, the gist of the picture is that money is no object for me, but please buy my books anyway. It’s literally all I have on my seforim shranks.

3. None of the walls in my house are nice enough to use as a background. We have thousands of dollars on the table in front of us, and people would be like, “Why are you doing origami? Fix your wall!” Right, because if I posed with no money in front of a shiny new wall, people would say, “Yeah! $18,000! I get it!”

So that’s my story. I don’t know how many other celebrities are posting their stories anywhere. Maybe the singers are going to turn them into songs. (“Taking a picture of a minivan… Staring at cash that I’ve turned into a fan… Why does the money say it’s made in Japan…?”) I think I wrote this article so no one looks at the picture and thinks that writers are swimming in money.

I also don’t want to tell you what we said to the meshulach who knocked while we were doing this either. I couldn’t give him a whole shpiel about what was happening, so I just gave him a few hundred dollars in fake cash and sent him on his way.

By Mordechai Schmutter

Mordechai Schmutter is a freelance writer and a humor columnist for Hamodia and other magazines. He also has six books out and does stand-up comedy. You can contact him at [email protected].