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[EmBark! Bark!]
(Dogs barking)

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[Please Bark!]
(Audience barking)

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[I can hardly hear you --
Please bark louder!]

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(Audience barking louder)

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[$100 prize for
the loudest and finest barker]

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(Audience continues to bark)

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[Just kidding, but... thanks anyway!!]

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(Laughter) (Applause)

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Mel Rosenberg:
Well, thank you very much for barking.

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That was a very good beginning,

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however, I can see there's a few of you

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who haven't been
to barking practice lately.

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If you wait a few minutes,
I'll give you another opportunity,

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and for those of you who feel
a spontaneous need to bark during my talk,

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please wait for another ten minutes.

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The thing is that young kids love to bark.

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They see it as a hoot, it's fun,

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it's spontaneous,
it's silly, it's wonderful,

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and if you ask them why,
they'll say, "Because".

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My sister Miriam, as a young child,
used to bark with such conviction

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that dogs would follow her
down the street,

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and if you ask her, she'd say, "Because".

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But as we grow up,
we forget the word "because".

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We become more worried
about words like insults,

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embarrassment,
snide comments, or self-conscious.

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And then we grow up.

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And as grown ups we crave one thing,
and that one thing is respectability.

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And if you had met me at the age of 39,
you would have thought I was respectable.

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And the truth is I was very respectable.

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I was a university scientist studying
how bacteria interact with the mouth,

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I had a bunch of papers,
I was up for professorship,

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I had innovations
and inventions in the oven.

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I was up and coming,
but inside, I was down and out.

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I was a wreck. A train wreck.

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I was afraid of failure,
but I was afraid of success.

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I was afraid of dying,
and I was also afraid of being alive.

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From a very young age, I had noticed
that once in a while my heart would go

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into some kind of Brazilian samba,
beating wildly in my chest.

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And once I was diagnosed,
or maybe I should say misdiagnosed,

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as having a very rare heart condition,

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and I spent the next 20 years
in mortal fear of dying.

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When I was 39, my wife said to me,
"Why don't you check?"

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So I did, I went to a famous cardiologist,
he looked at my electrocardiogram,

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and he said, "You have
a wacky electrocardiogram,

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but your heart is normal."

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I said, "What?"
He said, "Yes, you are going to live."

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And he was right.

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That was my first wake up call
at the age of 39.

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Because a few months later,

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I found out I had a completely separate
chronic medical condition

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that I have to deal with
on a day to day basis.

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So I cope.

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That was my second wake up call.

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And the third wake up call
was getting a puppy.

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Family dogs teach us
a lot about ourselves.

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The kids called him Elvis Presley.

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He didn't [sing], but boy,
did he ever have a life.

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He didn't sing, he barked.

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Elvis had a girlfriend named Camilla.

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And we didn't approve
of that relationship. She was a bitch.

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(Laughter)

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And we locked him up in the second floor,

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sure enough Elvis flew out of there
one day, over the balcony,

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to be reunited with his true love,

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and he wasn't worrying very much.

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That's what I call barking.

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And after those three wake up calls,
as I approached the age of 40,

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I realized that I had
to get myself something: a life.

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And so I began barking.

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My first port of call, as a barker,
was my university career

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because I had become interested
in something called bad breath,

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and I went to the library once,

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and I saw that nobody
was doing research on this subject

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which is so worrisome to all of us.

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I came home that night,

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and I said to my wife,
"I have found my scientific career.

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It's a scientific gold mine.
A stinky one."

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And at work, my colleagues made fun of me.

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They called me "Mel the Smell",

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they even coaxed me

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to leave my scientific papers
on bad breath out of my CV

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so that I would be promoted in the end.

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But I followed my nose.

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I wrote dozens of scientific papers.

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I smelled about 10,000 mouths,
more than most people.

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Now I do it only for fun.

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I wrote books, I organized
international meetings.

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I became the world expert on bad breath.

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And I say this to you
with a degree of modesty

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because there's only three of us,

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and each one claims
that he's the world expert.

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My second barking career
was writing children's books.

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I'd wanted to write
children's books from my 20s.

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I started in my 40s.

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My first books were albeit
closer to my comfort zone.

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I wrote books about bacteria,
I wrote books about dentistry,

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witches, dental witches,
toothbrushes, tooth fairies,

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but then I really began to bark.

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With the help
of the wonderful illustrator Rotem Omri,

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we created a whole zoo of characters.

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They all share one property.

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They are forced in their lives to cope
with a challenge and to overcome it.

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If you look over my left shoulder,
you see Tim the Porcupine.

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He wakes up one morning,
his quills are on backwards.

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He rubs everybody the wrong way.

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In the palm of my hand you see Kenya.

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Kenya can't hop, and that would be OK,
except she's a Kangaroo.

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But my favorite character is Gloomeris.

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Gloomeris is serious.
He has absolutely no sense of humor.

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And that might have been OK,
except that Gloomeris is a laughing hyena.

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Funny enough, I don't have
any dogs in any of my stories.

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But all my animals learn to bark.

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Finally, and perhaps most important,

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I became a professional musician
at the age of 47.

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It started when I was 41.

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I was at a party,
and there was a saxophone there.

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And I've been dying
to play the saxophone for years.

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I don't know why I didn't.

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But at the age of 41 I was there,
I was ready to change my life.

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I grabbed that beast,
and I put it to my lips.

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And noise came out.

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Terrible noise, but I got all excited,

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and I called my friend,
Chris McCulloch, in Toronto.

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And I said, "Chris, am I too old
to learn to play saxophone?"

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And he said something important.

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He said, "Mel, you're never too old
to play saxophone."

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The next thing you know,
before you could say maple syrup,

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Chris had bought me a saxophone,
shipped it from Toronto to Israel,

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and I began to play.

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Not now and then,
not here and there, but every day!

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I drove my family crazy.
The neighbors threatened me.

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I sometimes practiced
in the car, but I persisted.

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I had a wonderful teacher
who took me to a gig.

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He said, "You see that guy
playing saxophone, Benny Tal?

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He started when he was 35."

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I was incredulous,
but five years later, sure enough,

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I was gigging with my own band;
we've had some amazing gigs.

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We played at Shimon Peres's 80th birthday,
before he was president.

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Now he's president,
he's having a 90th birthday party,

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where they've invited some other performer
named Barbra Streisand.

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(Laughter)

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That's OK. I can wait another ten years.

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But what about Barbra Streisand?

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What would have happened

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if somebody insulted her
when she was nine or ten years old,

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and said to her, "Barbra,
you don't sing well. You're off key,"

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and she had stopped for years.

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We would have lost
one of the world's great performers.

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And I want to ask ourselves,
how many of us, when we were kids,

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wanted to draw, to paint,
to play an instrument, to sing,

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and somebody told us
that we weren't capable,

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or we thought
we might have been ridiculed,

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and we haven't done it up till now?

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How unfortunate that is!

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I stopped singing for 25 years.
You can't stop me now.

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In the meantime,
the years have flown by,

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and Elvis is dead, we have a new dog,
and his name is Fudge.

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Fudge not only loves to bark
he also sings.

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And I want you to have a look
at this instructional video,

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because afterwards, we'll do something

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that's never been done
in the history of mankind,

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So will you have a look with me, please?

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(Video) (Dog barking)
(Man playing the saxophone)

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Look at that creature. He's in his groove.
He's singing with me.

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He doesn't care if he's being criticized,
if there's jazz police.

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Whether he's on key,
maybe he doesn't get the words right,

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and I figure that if dogs can sing,

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the very least that human beings
can do, is to bark.

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And I'm going to do an experiment

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that's never been done
in the history of mankind,

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and you're going to join me
and make it happen.

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It's very simple, because changing
your life can start with a bark.

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I want you to bark with guts, with spirit.

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I don't care whether you moo, growl,
yelp, grrr, it doesn't matter.

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Because your life does
kind of depend on it, doesn't it?

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You can sing only in the shower,
or you can sing in the choir.

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You can step up to bat
with the bases loaded and two outs

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or you can watch the baseball game
from your living room.

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You can do your thing, or not.

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But one thing is for certain,

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whether we live our lives
and bark our dreams,

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at the end of the day,
we all end up croaking.

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So on the way, why not bark?

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So what we're going to do now

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(Laughter)

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is you're going to yelp, growl,
bark with all your might,

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and we're going to make this
a dream come true,

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and it doesn't matter
if you don't understand the words.

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Just let it all hang out. OK?

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Please follow the magic ball.

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Are you ready?

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(Saxophone music)
(Audience barking along "Autumn Leaves")

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(Applause)

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Inbar: Thank you, Mel.
MR: Oh, thank you!

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Inbar: Thank you, thank you very much.
MR: Woof!

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(Laughter) (Applause)

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Inbar: You do know, by the way,

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that Israeli dogs bark, "Hav!",
and American dogs bark, "Woof!",

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it's completely different kind.

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Mel: But when one dog from Israel
says, "Woof!" to a dog from the US,

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they understand each other.

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Inbar: If you're saying so.

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Thank you.

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(Applause)