Rick Mersel is the author of All Revved Up and Ready to Go: My Life in Concert. He is a featured author 2025 Lee & Bernard Jaffe Family Jewish Book Festival. Mersel will join his business partner and fellow Tidewater native Jessica Gordon for a conversation about his book. Register for the event at JewishVA.org/BookFest.
The first time I realized I wasn’t a writer was in an English class at Tulane University. It was supposed to be a casual assignment, write about someone important to you, and I figured I had it nailed. I wrote about my grandfather. He was Jewish, from the Lower East Side of New York, a Norfolk transplant, larger than life in that humble, old-school way. I thought I captured him perfectly. I turned in what I was sure was a heartfelt, honest portrait.
Then the professor read another student’s piece aloud. It was, ironically, about her grandmother. I was stunned. I remember physically feeling her words. Every line had texture, sound, scent. I could visualize every word like a movie unfolding. My own essay sat there in comparison, technically correct, but emotionally lifeless, like a flat, flavorless soda.
It rocked me. Honestly, it frightened me. I was a Norfolk Academy grad, a kid raised on polished sentences and clean grammar. But I hadn’t learned how to write. Not in the way that punches you in the gut and leaves a painful mark in the shape of a memory.
Back at Norfolk Academy, one teacher once told us to put our heads down on our desks and “travel through a green pepper.” Not metaphorically, literally imagine ourselves inside a pepper. At the time, we laughed. I was probably already checking out, thinking about what mischief I could get into that night. But she was onto something. She was trying to teach us to feel the writing. And I missed it. I didn’t understand until that Tulane class, where I sat in silent shame, knowing I’d have to try again. That I wasn’t done.
Forty years later, I did. The result is All Revved Up and Ready To Go: My Life in Concert, a memoir about music, chaos, and the crooked path to figuring out where the hell you belong.
Wards Corner and Norfolk’s Jewish community were the backdrop. It was suburbia with a little deli guilt and a lot of identity confusion. My mom was a former Temple secretary, pure Wards Corner royalty, who knew every face and every store owner. My grandfather ran Crossroads Restaurant before it became Tracks, before it became my sanctuary of sound. I used to ride my bike past Temple Israel, past Hirschler’s Shoes and Melvin’s Deli, trying to make sense of it all.
This book doesn’t hold back. It stage-dives through nostalgia. The chapters touch subtly but deeply on the Gen X Jewish experience in Norfolk, Virginia Beach, and New Orleans, like an undertone behind the noise. Many of you are in the book. And if you’re not, you’ll recognize the names, the haunts, and the moments, from bar mitzvah dances to Friar Tuck’s, to The Oceans Condominium, to The Boathouse, to The Bayou, all culminating at The NorVa.
I won’t give it all away here. These stories are meant to be felt, not summarized.
The Lee & Bernard Jaffe Family Jewish Book Festival is funded in part by the citizens of Virginia Beach through a grant from the City of Virginia Beach Arts and Humanities Commission and is held in coordination with the Jewish Book Council, the longest-running organization devoted exclusively to the support and celebration of Jewish literature.