I'm sorry to report that the traditional children's Christmas Pageant has gotten entirely out of hand. In my childhood – back in the days when we walked to school past the dinosaur pastures – the Pageant (always capitalized) consisted of a limited cast.
Billy Halley – who was reputedly in "delicate health" and whom Sister Theresa was convinced would become a priest – always played Joseph. For this role, he borrowed his father's bathrobe and, from heaven-knows-where, found a hood of sorts which kept slipping over his face making him look for all the world like the lord high executioner of some insanely medieval tyranny. Billy was probably the only kid in class whose father owned a bathrobe.
The classroom window pole furnished Joseph's staff. Nobody ever explained why Joseph needed a staff to lean on. That was simply the way it was, and everybody knew that. Years later I was to wonder if perhaps Joseph felt faint at witnessing childbirth – but by then I'd had a son-in-law pass out cold at sight of the blessed event of my grandchild's arrival. The father was long past the assistance of a classroom window pole, but a double bourbon at a bar near the hospital seemed to help. A couple millenniums ago, around Bethlehem, something like the window pole was, apparently, the only help Joseph had.
The Holy Mother was always played by Anna Maria Maniletti. Anna Maria was what my neo-Victorian grandmother would have called an "early developer." At age 12, she was a black-eyed, olive-complexioned beauty, obviously several years more mature than her schoolmates who, for the most part, were still waiting for their first pimples. After the parish elementary school, Anna Maria went to Holy Rosary for high school In her junior year, she became a blonde, and her grandmother began attending daily Mass and making one novena after another. A few years later, the Sisters of the Holy Rosary closed up the school. I don't think Anna Maria had anything to do with that, but her grandmother might have thought so.
All of these old memories were floating around in my head when we attended the grandchildren's Christmas Pageant this year. Billy's dad's bathrobe is gone, and air-conditioned classrooms don't have windows that open – with or without a pole allowing a 5-foot nun to handle the upper casement. Or maybe nobody wears bathrobes anymore. This cast was obviously professionally costumed – as realistically as the staging which stopped just short of live oxen, sheep and a donkey. I was a bit surprised the angels didn't actually fly; they were too busy following the direction of the choir master (Juilliard '99). The choir did "Adeste Fidelis" in syncopated rap, while the shepherds got down. It wasn't quite the way Sister Theresa would have done it, but it got a big hand, an encore, and three curtain calls.
The girl playing Mary was a tall, icy blonde wearing dangle earrings for a reason known only to 12-year-old girls. She didn't look much like a small-town Jewish girl of the Roman Empire, and she was a good head taller than her Joseph, who stuttered. Typecasting had obviously taken second place to other considerations – perhaps parental support since, at the first curtain call, the local florist came up the aisle with a tribute worthy of a Kentucky Derby winner, while young actress's father's halogen lights illuminated his video of the grand event.
Her father could have saved himself the effort. After the show, orders were being taken for professional videotapes of the performance. They were priced at just a bit more than orchestra seats to a first-run Broadway musical. I asked the sveltely coiffed volunteer if the proceeds went to the missions. All I got was a blank stare, so I guess the missions have gone the way of the window pole and the bathrobe.
We were almost back home when I realized that something was really missing from the evening. Nobody forgot his or her lines, everybody hit the cues like an ensemble of equity professionals. The wings did not fall off the angels, the scenery stayed upright, the curtain opened and closed when it was supposed to. Something is not quite right here, but I'm not sure just what it is.
