NO OF PAGES: 255 SUB CAT I: Bar/Bat Mitzvah SUB CAT II: SUB CAT III: DESCRIPTION: At age 66, theatrical designer Hays coauthor of the best-seller My Old Man and the Sea (with his son Daniel) Decided to study for his bar mitzvah, making up for decades of neglect in his religious education. This charming but slight memoir mixes the author's account of his classroom experiences among a bunch of 12-year-olds he dubs the ""Hormone Hurricanes"" and a rabbi younger than his son with reflections on his family and his own life path. (Trouble at the acclaimed National Theater for the Deaf, which he founded, has left him unmoored.) Hays's deft touch (not to mention his wife's delightful malapropisms) makes the book an easy read, but the narrative can be choppy: for example, a chapter devoted to a heartfelt account of his mother's death is followed by one that includes his musings on the stresses his preteen classmates must face. The sincerity of Hays's quest can't be doubted; for class, he wrote (and here reprints) a thoughtful essay on what might have happened if Anne Frank had lived. However, his classmates aren't that compelling (they're just kids, after all), and there's discontinuity between his life and his religious experience: he notes that he has already written about the themes of ""growing older and lost love"" in a book about stage lighting. Following his bar mitzvah, he has yet to grapple with some of the deeper questions provoked by the Jewish tradition. This book lacks the magic touch of Hays's last one and is unlikely to perform at a commensurate level; his theatrical background, however, should energize his 6-city tour.NOTES: Purchased from Amazon Marketplace. SUBTITLE: The Bar Mitzvah Journey of a Grown Man