Christmas Mash-Up

Merry's question should have been adequate warning for the reaction of an entire room of people, faces flushed with Christmas: "What is the play ABOUT?"

As my friend Elesha (aka, Singer One in the play)said, "It's highly conceptual."

These were my goals as I wrote the script and directed a crew of wild children: to avoid a dry retelling of the classic Christmas story; to evoke a child-like spirit of wonder and questions; to keep the play, and thus the practices, mercifully short.

Basically, as I explained to my friend Sal this morning, the play was a God-spell like Christmas mash-up, with children asking questions, playing drums, singing snippets of Christmas carols, and reading short lines from scripts. They were dressed in a variety of colors and outfits from around the world and scarves were draped over a series of wooden stairs and tiny folding chairs. Granted, the last carol, "Joy to the World," in which the audience was supposed to participate, started in, say, at least three different keys, and may have never totally recovered, but the kids played their drums and Martin banged out a good beat on a metal chair, and even Bea, in her tiny Chinese pantsuit, joined in on the djembe. Afterwards there was a stunned silence into which I yelled, "That's our Christmas celebration for this year! And now we can all EAT!"

Which we did--I flew back to the church kitchen to cut up my Texas sheet cake. And nobody said anything about the Christmas play--not any of the women who came back to retrieve pots of soup or casseroles for the pot-luck table, not any of the men who cleared up afterward. I'm used to Baptists or free-wheeling nondenominationalists or dry but funny Episcopalians who, in their various ways, gush a little more: "Oh, honey, that was so cuuute," a Baptist Texan at Martin's parent's church might have said (I imagined), "Those kids looked so dahlin' up there, and they beat their drums so well."

From the Mennonites, nothing. I couldn't figure out whether it was because one is not supposed to congratulate anyone on their accomplishments, since all the glory is due God, or whether they just all were so confused they had no idea what in the world to say. Finally I dropped a word to young-church-lady Rachel, who was collecting cutlery and setting up the tea bags in little baskets, and she confirmed that the children had really enjoyed themselves. Not a single word from the rest of church-goers, and was I being paranoid when I caught a funny light in the choir director's eyes when she spoke to me later over plates of sloppy joe and unidentifiable food?

Not to worry; I ate a lot of dessert with good people, sang some carols, and the kids beat their drums and waved scarves all evening, through the eating and the sacred singing, creating such a racket on stage that most of us were afraid to watch lest we must chide for irresponsible behavior. But I think all that joyful racket was an indication that THEY GOT IT, they got the Christmas fever, or the Christmas FEVA, man. As I ate my tenth slice of cake, Martin grinned and said, "Just see if they ask YOU to do the Christmas play again!" and we high-fived.

Merry Christmas, people. Rock the season. There's much to celebrate, much play to be had, little cause for overwrought solemnity, more cause for drum-beating and flashes of light and crying babies--and children, like wayward, dirty shepherds, yelling and spreading their raucous joy all over our stages and our lives.

Rainy Day Activities

Zombie Dancing. New Wazoo favorite.

The Inside of Music

I told Martin last night, "I bet nobody has ever done Lenten dancing to Better Than Ezra," and he agreed.

"I really don't feel like dancing," Martin said, all bleary-eyed from too much grading. I know how he feels, though I think he is, in general, a more patient and wise person than I, and that's why he's a teacher and I'm not. I absolutely hate grading a stack of papers--there's the writing that makes me hope for the future, but there's also so much bad writing--and then I'm torn between relationship with the student and the righteous indignation I feel when I write F, just stopping myself from adding, "Excruciating to read. After reading your drivel, I feel closer to despair than I did before I started."

Martin shows real patience, though, and he sees real progress with his students. He delights in their progress the way I find joy in the burgeoning of a story I'm writing. When we were in college, our graded papers bore--maybe--two or three comments, or check marks or just a grade. Martin fills his student's papers with comments and scribbles and marks, and he's gained a reputation for being a hard grader. But if they have any sense, his students know that this is the way Martin, as their teacher, pays them respect.

And so Martin emerged from the murky tunnels of essay grading not a little wall-eyed. And some weird dancing followed, people. Occasionally I'd see him behind me, with the purple hat pulled down over his eyes, writhing in inner pain. "Are we done?" I'd say, ready to turn off Ezra and go on to TV. "Another one," he'd answer, and pull down that hat again. "Can you even see?" I asked, and worried for his safety as he wriggled and dove all over the room. At one point he was thudding on the armchair with his fists.

"I'm inside the music," he said.

Let me give a little background here. Martin's and my first days together were marked by his musical snobbery. Minute by minute, he pulled down my castles of feel-good music and happily trampled on my preferences for show tunes and Roger Whittaker--in order to educate my tastes and raise me to his erudite mesa of artistry. In our little, two-door Honda with the bad sound system, he played tapes and CDs of music that literally made me want to jump out of the window. Or pound my head repeatedly on the dashboard. It was so unlistenable, so wretched, so discordant and NOISY. I resisted education at every possible, painful juncture. I had never cared about musician's or songwriter's histories or stories or approaches, and I jolly well was not going to start caring about what I thought was mere trivia.

BUT. . .ten years later, I'm opting for The Decemberists or The Weepies and saying things like, "That song is very Dylan, but he's totally butchering the approach--there's only one Dylan, and this guy is not him" or "That song has a real Beatlesque sound, but it's actually more like. . ." Blah, blah, blah. I can actually listen to a song and say who's singing it. And I enjoy a much wider range of music. But I still have little patience for music I don't like.

So this is why Martin, who's absolutely gaga for music and listens to the most appalling noise, got inside the music and was moving around our library like a bear with a toothache. Me? I was practicing kicking my leg and lifting my arm ballet-like. I was still aware of droopy boobs and how I wanted to take some more off the thickening wintry middle area of Kim Cockroft. But then. . .I shut my eyes.

And the whole library was gone, and so was Martin, and so was I. I was suddenly inside the Better Than Ezra song, and I was exploring the complexities of the music with my body. Mostly, I was pulling my arm toward my head, over and over again, like somebody caught in a loop, but this repetitive motion worked like a meditative prayer--I mean, it cleaned me out and took me to a place beyond sight or words. Needless to say, if I could have seen myself, I would have laughed myself silly or blushed beet-red. But I couldn't see myself--I just was.

I've always both envied and also kind of looked down on people who lose themselves in something. As a writer, I'm always writing about an incident as I'm living it. There's often the Voice narrating action and reaction and there's little chance of getting so lost in an experience that I haven't already formulated one or two descriptions of it. I'm rather embarrassed and anthropologist-like about ecstasy, of all kinds. My ears light up like ambulance sirens or I break into hives if I become too emotional with anyone I don't know too well. And if anyone had come into the library last night, I would have given a good explanation of our craziness and offered them tea. I mean, no way would Martin and I dance like this around other people.

And yet. . .maybe we should. Or maybe we shouldn't. There's no real cultural home for this kind of expression in our tradition. My stripe of Caucasian American doesn't do any kind of ritual drumming or chanting or dancing. The only venue for publicly losing self-consciousness is a charismatic church or. . .a bar? Or maybe a group therapy session? Though I am duly grateful for all The Enlightenment did for us and our culture, it ruined us in some ways, don't you think? It saved us from superstition, cleared our minds, gave us scientific method, and absolutely ruined our capacity to dance like fools. Or maybe the two have nothing to do with each other. Maybe, if we loosen up some, we who are tied up in self-important knots dance MORE like fools because we HAVE to--we have to give ourselves up to some expression that doesn't rely on the entanglements and pomposity of words.

Dance Party with Thirty-Somethings in Bathrobes and Purple Hats

Martin's cookin chili and the two older girls are quacking like ducks. Regular sort of night at the Cockroft house.

I wonder how a big bowl of chili and a beer will mix with Lenten dancing? Yep, Martin and I are dancing fools. And I mean that. This man, this man with big hands and fabled feet, who trips over rugs and collides with multiple household items on a regular basis, this man can DANCE, folks.

The first night we switched on Jamiroquai, with the lights on and the curtains open (we noticed at least one car slowing down as it passed our house, and we wondered what our new neighbors across the street must think of us). It took us a while to find our groove, and that was the night Martin figured out that if he wore the hat, he could dance.


The second night we turned off the lights and loaded up Ricky Martin. I started off in my huge red flannel robe that makes me look like a stuffed taco (it was cold!) but by the time the World Cup theme came, I had shed the robe and Martin and I were throwing ourselves wildly all over the library.

The third we tried some Kenyan/Tanzanian music (Martin said, this sounds like Paul Simon, and then corrected himself: Paul Simon sounds like this). We left one light on. It turns out that music from different continents stretches a whole new set of muscles you didn't know you had, and so ten minutes of this music knocked us flat.

And here's the funny thing: almost every night, I'm completely exhausted, and I kind of drag myself into the library. Martin often grumps about the music until he's got his dancing hat on, and after that he becomes a different crazy person. But after dancing, we are completely renewed, our appetites have altered to want fruit instead of our night-time junk fest, and we've laughed ourselves into a younger mood. This is the stuff, people. Sheer silliness and shine.

Totally Losing It For Lent

I've decided to give up moderation for Lent. This has been a running joke in our house for years now--I always have plenty of suggestions for Martin on what he might give up for Lent (of course they always directly benefit me) but all I am willing to give up is housework (especially laundry) or self-control.

But this year, I'm totally serious. Last night we were eating beef (a rare occasion at our house). I had carefully set aside a piece of fat so I wouldn't eat it but Elsepth, as befits her perfectly, grabbed it up and stuffed it into her mouth. "That's disgusting!" I said. "Don't eat that! It's yucky!"

"It's GOOD," she said, and she chewed it up and swallowed it. Seemed appropriate on Fat Tuesday. Elspeth eating beef fat for Mardis Gras. But before you vegetarians (sorry, my sister) faint dead away, I do have a point. I'll get to it eventually, maybe (unluckily for you people, I've given up pithiness for Lent as well).

Those of you who know us well know that Martin and I have moved an ungodly number of times before settling here at Wazoo. One of our years was spent in an incredibly frigid part of Iowa, in a picture-perfect little Dutch town. I do mean, PICTURE PERFECT. It was like a set from a movie. The streets sparkled, the park was immaculate, and the sound of mowers roared up and down the streets all week long, except on Sunday, when a preternatural quiet fell over everything like a blanket of create-in-me-a-clean-heart snow. (A couple people warned us that Sundays were serious business, but I didn't really believe them until, right before we left said perfect town, we ventured out to do a little gardening on a Sunday. And by golly, the nay-sayers weren't lying. We felt as if we were sacrificing goats on our front lawn to some unknown god instead of digging holes for flowers in the soil.)

In the spring, tulips popped up in absolutely perfect rows as if they were in a florist's window. And I wouldn't be joshing you if I told you that people went out with little bitty scissors to manicure their grass. Those of you who have ever driven by Wazoo know enough about us to realize Martin and I were totally and completely out of place there. And it was a funny thing, too--though everyone was very nice, I've never seen such sour, dour expressions on the faces of women.

After some months of this absolute perfection, what I wanted (even if I didn't articulate it then) was loud neighbors, big-boobed grandmas wearing skimpy tanktops that showed their armpit hair who called their children with booming voices. I wanted a Mama living next door who knocked people upside the head and boiled huge pots of pasta. I wanted some guy with a hat on backwards to take his shirt off and fix the car on a Sunday. I wanted a Mardis Gras parade in the streets. Instead, there was a Tulip Festival, where all the girls clad themselves in wooden shoes and swept the spotless streets so clean that you could eat Dutch sausage right off the pavement.

Now we live in such ramshackle glory that one sad day I actually yelled after a motorist like a banshee: GET A MUFFLER! But, despite the rather loud cars without mufflers and the coal mine not far away, Martin and I feel much more comfortable here in our completely imperfect corner of Pennsylvania than we ever felt in Dutch Perfection.

So I'm paddling slowly back to Lent here. La, la, la. It seems to me that many of us Puritans or self-deniers have a lot to learn from ramshackle, from the people we squint at who are too loud or too expressive in their grief or their joy. We use the same expression with both people who have lost their heads in tears or lost their heads laughing: Oh man, she's totally LOST it. Thank God, we think, we've got the self control not to slop ourselves all over the place. So we retreat to this great, terse, pithy sarcasm to sum up what's deep and mysterious within us. It's so East-coast of us. So funny. So dry. And so Oscar Wilde, too, and so smart. It makes us feel in control to arrange our thoughts and our faces so neatly and picture-perfectly.

I think I'm going to give that up for Lent. I've never been any good at it, anyway. I will not attempt to be a park full of tulips. I will be the weedy garden I am all the time, and I won't make anyone miserable because I'm not perfect. Hey, everyone, I'm a mess! And so are you! Happy Lent to you!

Becoming more and more loosey-goosey is a job for some of us, especially those of us with Finnish or German blood. Martin has a dose of Italian and Irish or Scottish, so he's okay. I, on the other hand, must continually remind myself that I want to be an eccentric, happy old woman, not a tight-fisted, angry one. And I want to do it largely without chemical stimulants.

Also, for Lent, I am taking up dancing. Or I should say, returning to regular dancing, since everyone dances when they are children. Every night after I deposit the children in bed I will turn up the music and I will dance like a fool. Martin is joining me. He has to wear a purple hat with a tassel in order to really loosen up enough to get his joints swinging. But once he tightens that purple hat around his ears, he's crazy magic.

If anyone would like to join us, I expect we'll start at around nine at night and go for about forty-five minutes. Bring your hats, bring your fats, bring your messy selves.