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If you’re like me, then we’re identical twins separated at birth
who grew to adulthood without knowing each other. If you’re a
little bit less like me than that, but still in the same ball
park as far as the kind of fella you tend to be, you probably
find yourself wondering "Should a guy who once watched two
Dwarves arm wrestle under a pool table in a Florida Lesbian bar
even be allowed to direct a Sunday school pageant?"
It was a Unitarian Sunday school, but you probably guessed that
by now. And while several other people in my party saw a single
Dwarf at the bar later that evening, I’m the only one claiming
two have scene two of them arm wrestling. To be fair, I might
have imagined it. I’d had a bit to drink. I was miffed it had
taken a full half hour for anyone to realize I wasn’t just a
really butch dyke. My wife says it’s because I use words like
‘miffed’. What the hell does she know? Was she there? Is she a
Dwarf?
The point is, twenty years later I’m directing kids in a Noah’s
Ark pageant at a Unitarian Church and worrying I’ve maybe lost
some of my edge. That is not an excuse for my behavior. It is an
explanation. A justification, a way of saying what happened was
not my fault, which I suppose technically is an excuse, but you
know what? Why don’t you bite me? Why don’t you take a frigging
number and get at the very end of the extremely long line of
people who need to bite me.
I mean, it just seems to me that one minute it’s two A.M., I’m
in a windowless confirmed bachelorette bar swapping Quantro
shots with a Little Person who is a quarter of an hour away from
breaking my thumb when it finally gets through her undersized
head that I am a MAN, I am here with female FRIENDS, and the
next minute? I have a mortgage, two kids, a wife, I’m standing
in the aisle of our nations oldest houses of Worship, mere feet
from the pew Nathaniel frigging Hawthorne sung hymns from,
shrieking at a sobbing four year old in a dove costume.
"No Philip, NO! You can NOT be a lion in the animal parade for
the simple reason that you are the DOVE! THAT is the reason
behind the dove costume you are wearing, that is WHY you run
flapping down the aisle and back again with a branch in your
beak, something I imagine you have never seen any of the lions
on the Discovery Kid’s channel do, because lions CAN’T fly and
if they did they’d come back with a dead gazelle dangling by
it’s broken neck from their beak, which would really suck as a
symbol of peace when compared with an olive branch, and in case
your little pre-school brain has never taken this in, LIONS DO
NOT HAVE BEAKS! If you were HELL BENT on being a fucking LION
you damn well should have SAID so a month ago when I first
dipped my toes in this FUCKING QUAGMIRE of a PAGEANT!"
I want to say that this outburst was something I built up to
over a period of several weeks. It wouldn’t be true, but it
certainly would paint me in a better light. I mean at some point
I’m sure I could have said "no" to all of this, but when was
that point? And was I thinking about Anne Margaret in "Viva Las
Vegas"? Because there should be a goddamned law against asking a
guy to direct a Sunday school Pageant while he’s thinking about
Anne Margaret in "Viva Las Vegas". If you haven’t seen it you
need to rent it now, because the moment the King let her go is
the moment he set foot on a path that led to a solitary, naked
death on a toilet.
See, the thing is, when you agree to do a pageant about Noah’s
ark? You are agreeing to write a children’s play that features
God KILLING VIRTUALLY EVERY LIVING THING ON THE PLANET. Good old
benevolent God on his granite throne with his long white beard
and his bathrobe, which is the way kids see Him no matter what
you tell them, orchestrating the most complete genocide, the
most thorough holocaust, EVER! Everyone thinks Noah’s Ark is all
cute animals, "Twoseys-Twoseys" and "Gopher Barky-Barky", and I
suppose it is, but each of those animals are the LAST OF THEIR
KIND! The Ark tossed for forty days and nights on a ocean filled
with BLOATING CORPSES!
Which is what I TRIED to explain to the hapless little pre-schoolers
who were my ‘cast’ during the first read through. I tried to
tell them this was the story of a capricious, dangerous All
Father, that it was a way of understanding a world where tragedy
and horror lurked around every corner, and there was never any
explanation for the endless, agonizing struggle for existence, a
world NO DIFFERENT from their own. And some little child star,
some angelic Pre-Raphaelite cherub, quite possibly one of my
daughters (which might explain why she was not yet crying,
having grown used to my methods of expression over the years)
pipes up:
"But what about the Rainbow?"
"The Rainbow." I replied, "The Rainbow, the Rainbow, ah, yes,
what… about… the rainbow? Sung by Kermit, Lisa Frank’d on
backpacks and lunchboxes and notebooks and bicycle helmets,
Listlessly inscribed on any non-moving surface by anime-eyed
hopefuls such as yourself, THE RAINBOW! Our Lord’s promise, his
admission that perhaps in killing off every human being on earth
down to the last suckling babe who wasn’t immediate family of
one, stinking boat builder, He MIGHT HAVE OVERREACTED A TAD! The
Rainbow, the RAINBOW, the Holy sign that God will NEVER AGAIN
destroy all life!… With a flood."
"That Holy Cheater! That divine finger crosser! Don’t you get
it? Does the rainbow mean he won’t kill us all with a comet?! Is
it any proof against Him making the SUN BLOW UP, or go OUT or
just swell enough to roast us all like a world full of
Thanksgiving Day TURKEYS?! Does that rainbow say "I, GOD, will
NEVER send a pandemic Plague that will make your underarms swell
up like grapefruits until the pressure cracks your chest
cavities like frigging WALNUTS?! PEOPLE, PEOPLE, HOW ARE WE
SUPPOSED TO DO THIS PLAY IF YOU DON’T AT LEAST TRY TO UNDERSTAND
IT?!"
Now, see, that got even my daughter, if that’s who she was,
crying. I have a gift, and I’m like a terrier, I don’t give up
‘till the hole is dug.
I guess I have to wonder (as several of the parents did, in
writing) if I’m really the right person to be an upstanding
member of the community? If I’m totally honest, I have to say I
wasn’t really any more comfortable trying to improvise my way
through a knife fight with a Lesbian Dwarf, but if she won (and
my friends say she did) I’m sure it was due to my broken thumb.
Wouldn’t you think, though, that on the twenty year pendulum
swing from drunken brawling in a Florida Lesbian bar to
directing a Sunday school pageant at a New England Historical
Landmark, somewhere in between might have felt… comfortable?
It’s probably just the fistful of Excedrin Migraine Relief
talking, but is that really too much to ask? A little stretch of
Rainbow I might call my own?
Next year I am scheduled to do "Daniel and the Lions Den", which
should go more smoothly. Nothing But Lions in that one, and not
a dove to be seen, though I may have couple of the youngest
girls arm wrestle in the background.
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