Last night was quite an emotional event for me. I remember well the grease paint, the stage lights, the changing into costume and character, the rumble of the audience awaiting the curtain to rise, the orchestra in its pit fine tuning their instruments, and that momentous knock on my dressing room “Five minutes to show time, Mr. Christie”. Yes, my 5th grade Christmas Pageant, where I played Gabriel so well it made my mother cry, was riding the nostalgia train back into my consciousness.
You see, last night I again enjoyed a live Christmas pageant, but as a member of the audience. We were all seated in a dank field, and the play (produced by a local church) was a traditional rendering of the birth of Jesus. The audience was made up mostly of youthful parents and their hordes of noisy screaming children.. I actually felt rather nervous until the play began and the audience was “safe” in the dark. After all, this was a fundamentalist Christian church. Being in the middle of such literal minded Bible thumpers made me feel somewhat like a Jewish American spy in Nazi Germany. OK, I know that is an outrageous statement but I’ll share why I said it.
I know political and religious code language when I see it. As I walked into the play area, I was handed a free CD that was called “FOCUS ON THE FAMILY – RECAPTURING AMERICA FROM THE LIBERALS” Yep, “Focus on the Family” = classic code words for “Let’s scapegoat the gays since they don’t belong in decent Christian families”.
Then the minister arrived to introduce the play. Yikes! He had a thick Southern accent, which is always dangerous when combined with a Bible. Have you noticed now many of the right wing preachers on God TV have thick southern accents? I slunk a little lower into my seat and pulled my cap down low over my face.
The play began with Mary sitting on the floor knitting a hat to keep her pet camel warm. Suddenly Gabriel, a handsome young man wired for sound, appeared and in a rather tired monotonous tone told Mary that she was going to lose her virginity without any of the fun associated with this milestone in life. . Poor Mary. She was going to be “overshadowed” by the Holy Spirit. Well, Mary took the news well since it is very hard to argue with the Biblical God. He, like John McCain, is subject to nasty temper tantrums.
Just between you and me, I can see why the Holy Spirit would be attracted to this particular Mary. I always visualized Mary as being rather demure and plain, even shy until she began appearing to large sell-out crowds at Lourdes. But this Mary was quite a dish, perhaps even a seven course meal! She had a beautiful face, tastefully applied make-up, and a smashing golden Dolly Parton wig. This mother of Jesus could have easily modeled for VICTORIA’S SECRETS!
As for Gabriel, I just didn’t feel his heart was in the message. Gabriel seemed tired and bored, wanting to get the message delivered quickly so he could return to heaven, take his sandals off and go to sleep. The concept of angels sleeping has always troubled me. When I was a little boy, I couldn’t see how angels could sleep in a bed with those big wings in the way, so I assumed they slept hanging upside down like bats. But then I realized that their robes would fall down over their faces, revealing their sacred angelic underpants. As a kid, I settled this theological conundrum for myself by assuming that angels sleep in Long Johns. Didn’t Clarence the angel wear Long Johns in the movie with Jimmy Stewart IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE?
The play involved a few choice vignettes from the Christmas story: Mary gets told she has lost that which every bride (until the 1960’s) saved for her husband on the wedding night. Then Joseph and Mary were off to Bethlehem for Caesar’s stupid census, then suddenly Jesus was born (and BRAVO for reality! He was a real baby, not a doll),
Then for no logical reason I can think of, the shepherds were notified by Gabriel, who clearly was inwardly praying “God, Can I come home after informing these yokels?”. For this scene, the young man portraying Gabriel ascended a stairs and stood on a platform above the shepherds. Alas, he was in the center of a spotlight which acted as an x-ray, allowing the audience to see through his flimsy bed sheet robe to settle forever the question of whether angels are male or female. The shepherds made a big fuss after seeing Gabriel’s genitals. Each grabbed their favorite sheep and came to see the baby.
Then the wise men appeared, looking just as you would expect such men to appear in a local church play. Each one wore a different colored bed sheet, and seemed to have waste baskets on their heads, lined in gold and silver Christmas wrapping paper .. If any of you are sophisticated movie viewers like me, the wise men would have immediately reminded you of Gonzo’s space relatives as they descended from their space ship in the intense movie MUPPETS FROM SPACE. However, here the correspondence ends. In the movie, Gonzo is shot into space from a cannon. But these wise men just dumped some gold colored stones, a gold sprayed vase and some silverware into Jesus’ manger (so the kid could literally be born with a silver spoon in his mouth, thereby fulfilling Biblical prophecy).
The final scene was of a glowing cross, so all the kiddies in the audience would know how guilty they should be that Jesus was born just so God could kill him off on their behalf, the dirty little buggers!
Frankly, I enjoyed the experience very much, notwithstanding the possibility that if the rest of the audience knew that 2 fags were there, it could have turned into a public stoning! Nonetheless, such cute little plays seem to be part of Amercana and satiated my need to celebrate Christmas the old fashioned way. And the best part? No one mentioned “elimination” (see December 15’s post).
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