Did you know that legendary folk musician Bernie Sanders also enjoyed a brief career as a thespian?
The spoken-word maestro behind the classic album We Shall Overcome makes a brief appearance in the 1999 romantic comedy My X-Girlfriend’s Wedding Reception. In it, Sanders plays a baseball-obsessed rabbi named Manny Shevitz. The film tells the story of a brokenhearted wedding musician forced to play his former flame’s big night. But for whatever reason, the film devotes a solid two minutes to Rabbi Bernie Sanders’s extended reflections on the Brooklyn Dodgers.
“I remember when the Dodgers played the Yankees, and you bought a ticket — that ticket was good for ten years,” Shevitz laments with increasing incoherence, sounding an awful lot like a certain Sanders parody account. “Now you go to the stadium and you look out on the field: You see the Red Sox, the Orioles, the Cleveland Indians, but you don’t see the Yankees versus the Red Sox.”
Sanders’s only other movie role, per IMDb, was as a homeowner handing out candy to trick-or-treaters, in 1998’s Sweet Hearts Dance. That film co-stars Susan Sarandon, who, apparently, is now supporting Sanders in some sort of political campaign. Hard to imagine a pop-culture icon like Sanders holding national office, but hey, it worked for Ronald Reagan.
