Dance Fever

I bet you’re wondering why I’m featuring a Simchat Torah cake the day after Shavuot. Well, for one thing I think a little dancing is in order on Shavuot in addition to staying up all night learning. If nothing else, it would help keep you awake during the small hours of the morning, because no matter how scintillating the speaker, I freely admit that at 3 a.m. I am not paying the slightest attention to anything but the inside of my eyelids (which is why I’m not too proud to say that I generally attend one or two lectures and then happily head home).

Actually, this cake was not made for Simchat Torah at all, but rather for a party celebrating the 18^th birthday of a young man fortunate enough to have the Rebbe (choose one) visit his yeshiva on the very date of his birth!

This cake was a bit of a challenge, since drawing people in motion is not exactly my forte. Luckily, I found an animated GIF online of a dancing Chasid (that’s Graphic Interchange Format for the uninitiated, although if you’ve never heard of it, I doubt that that explanation was illuminating in any way). It’s a simple animation made up of only a few frames. The question was, how could I break it down into individual frames and copy them?

Here’s an extremely useful site that will accomplish exactly that: https://gif-explode.com/ Upload your GIF and follow the directions. I am not a hi-tech wizard by any means and I managed it without any difficultly.

If you spin the cake around fast enough, it’s just like watching a movie!