***
The night of the performance approached.
In the late afternoon our phone rang. My mother looked alarmed. My father steadfastly remained in his den. With a strong accent of his own (foreign, not rural, in his case), the telephone was not his friend. So it fell to my mother to take the momentous call and drag me off to school right away.
Oh my god, I thought, addressing a deity that had proved extremely unreliable in previous crisis management challenges but was nevertheless the only one I felt able to call upon, what have I done wrong? Oh god, please let me be in the school play today as an angel, I’ll never aspire to parts above my station again. Please...
The teacher awaited me breathlessly, her assistant the religious instructor and our head of costumes the needlework teacher right behind her, wearing serious expressions. To my anxious eye, they looked like a hanging jury.
With them was the snotty girl whom I had had to give my four lines in the finale to. She looked excited, twirling her already expensively styled blonde locks. Was she going to take the lot? Desperately I looked over my shoulder as my mother shooed me in and ran. Whatever my fate was, she would not share it. It never occurred to me then that my mother had perhaps shared a terrible fate far too often in her life before...
‘Your mother says you still know the whole play by heart’, said the teacher without preamble. Nice behaviour such as saying hello and thank you, instilled into us with great force since we first entered the gates of that school, seemed to have gone out of the window in a crisis of this magnitude. I had always suspected that it was slightly unnecessary.
‘Yes’, I said cautiously, wondering how that could be used against me. Was I going to be demoted to the prompt box?
‘Well’, said the teacher, ‘we are going to have to shift the roles around a bit.’
My heart sunk. On the other hand they were still using the word ‘roles’. Right then, just being on stage, even as a sheep, was all I wanted. God let me be in the play even if I have to be a sheep… Well, perhaps not as a sheep... No… I couldn’t decide but I needed to tell the deity so that he could act…
Which was why I didn’t hear properly what the teacher said next.
Only when all four of them, including the snotty girl, held my gaze with big eyes and imploring looks did I realize that, just for once, the shoe was on the other foot. And what a shoe! Cinderella was nothing compared to this. Nothing.
Improbable as it seemed, our Virgin Mary, it appeared, had been struck down with a mystery virus that very lunchtime. My life had suddenly shifted genres and now played out the plot of one of those cheap books for women that my father so despised (and my mother secretly loved).
And right now, in the kind of fairy tale twist that only Cinderella and my aunt would understand, I was the only one who could save the show. Because I alone knew all the parts and all the staging.
Yes, I, the girl from the wrong religion, the girl with the wrong colour of hair, the girl who had never even been a princess before, was going to be the Virgin Mary.
For a moment I closed my eyes and saw all those stars we had made dance around my head and out into the dark winter night, into the infinite universe…
Then I went to work.
Astonishing how fast I could adapt to good fortune, even if it was unfamiliar. Had the deity finally come across with the goods? Who knew. Now I regretted my promises of humility and resolved to plot how to get around keeping them. After the show…
It turned out that mine was a fate my mother could easily have shared, but she was already far away.
Although I was now the lead actress in the entire show (and I knew exactly how many lines she had, and how the rest of the cast was reverently staged around her in almost every scene), most of my time until curtain up was spent in tutoring the snotty girl in my former role of archangel Gabriel, which she now combined with the final four lines. She was quite up to the task, I had to admit. Almost as if she, too, had secretly studied up. Had she been asked to substitute for the Virgin Mary first?
Well, maybe she had and maybe she hadn’t. It didn’t matter now.
Our costume director aka the needlecraft teacher came in and prepped me for the part. I was now the one who wore the blue dress and long headscarf modelled on the nativity figures in the local church. The needlecraft teacher combed my fringe up and fastened the strands of hair with strong piercing pins. I tried to protest in a futile attempt to stay loyal to my mother but it was no good. I would have to face the world, under the bright lights of the stage, right on, with my bare Neanderthal forehead.
All this meant that we barely made it, and the audience was already audible behind the thick school curtains, when we I made my way to my now important place in the wings for my first scene, getting ready to walk in, pregnant, with Joseph, all the way from Nazareth.
My heart was filled with joy, I swallowed big gulps of the dusty air, already breathed in by many students before me.
And so I nearly didn’t see a small round figure, wrapped into a piece of backdrop, until I almost fell over her, endangering the blue dress I had only worn for less than half an hour.
A small head popped out from the dirty black fabric.
It was my not-quite-friend from behind the bicycle bush. And she was crying her heart out.
‘I’ve lost my lines’, she sobbed. ‘Just now, just now. I learned them for two months.
She stopped and coughed.
‘But I thought you were Shepherd Three?’ I said.
‘Yes’, said my not-quite-friend desolately. ‘What is that brightness in the sky…’
‘Exactly’, I said. From the other side of the wings I could hear the scruffle of many feet for the choral line up that would start off the play.
‘No’, my not-quite-friend continued. ‘I mean, I was until tonight. Now Shepherd Two has my lines, in addition to his own’, she said, her rural accent getting stronger. ‘And my grandmother is watching.’ She cried again.
‘Why?’ I said, but with a sinking feeling.
‘It’s because I have a cough’, she said. ‘The teacher didn’t want to risk it. But I’ve got a new part.’ She shook her head, trying to shake off the tears too.
‘What are you now?’, I said, fearing the worst.
My not-quite-friend clung to her curtain. Her face flushed red.
‘A sheep,’ she said. ‘A sheep.’
And indeed, the fabric fell away, revealing the tell-tale car seat fleece of shame.
I reached out to her in all my Virgin Mary finery and gave her a hug. Sheep fur stuck to my blue skirt.
‘I’m so sorry’. I said.
She coughed and nodded.
‘I think I won’t go on at all’, she said. ‘I’ll just stay here. I don’t want to be a sheep.’
I didn’t know what to say. Only a few hours ago I had told god that a sheep was beyond the boundaries of my humility, even in the face of unknown disaster, and now I had risen to the Virgin Mary while my not-quite-friend had fallen to the lowest point of existence, at least in the terms of our school play. And I knew why, even if she didn’t. I had made it, but discrimination was still alive.
‘Come, come!’ The teacher rushed through the wings. ‘I don’t want to lose another one!’ She grabbed my hand and tore me away from the sheep.
At the important entrance spot, Joseph was standing in position, staff in hand, head hung low. His father the headmaster had him firmly by the shoulders.
‘Have you been throwing up again’, the headmaster said sternly.’
Joseph was very pale. ‘No’, he whispered.
I said nothing about the little puddle seeping into the wall behind them that I could see out of the corner of my eye.
‘Look at each other’, demanded my teacher and pushed us towards each other.
Obediently, Joseph looked up.
And saw me.
In all the commotion, the teacher obviously had neglected to tell him that he h
ad a new fiancée.
I think I can truthfully say that no man has ever been so happy to see me in my entire life.
With unexpected strength he unwriggled himself from his father’s grip and pulled me close. Close enough so that I was able to whisper his opening lines as he solicitously escorted me onto the stage, after the opening carols were finally finished.
I had always known that the Virgin Mary was the centre of this play. What I hadn’t realised until the moment I walked out on stage was that being her felt like being in the centre of the universe.
And as if fate (or god or whoever did these things) was going out of its way to add to my happiness, I began to feel the effects of the famous time dilation that is the property of peak experiences, good and bad, experiences that make a minute feel like an hour, and an hour like a life time. Experiences that imprint themselves onto the brain and carve out new paths between the neurons.
Flowing through the play I felt as if I was transformed into a shape that was bigger than me, bigger even than the coveted part I was finally fortunate enough to play. Even I, who knew the whole play by heart and had recited it many times to the covered ears of my sister, and to the snow falling across the pavement on my way to school, had not felt the shape of the play come together like this before. The play, with all its words, actors, costumes and songs became a living being, and I was its living, beating heart.
Of course nothing lasts forever, but in a way it didn’t need to.
I flowed through the long walk to Bethlehem, and the scene with the innkeeper (whose black eye had fought its way through the makeup and caused an unexpected roar of laughter from the fathers and uncles who had not expected any kind of entertainment here that they could genuinely enjoy), the rocking of the anatomically incorrect but decorously swaddled doll and the adoration of shepherds, angels and kings alike. I spoke my virginal words with clarity and emotion, and generously helped out anyone who had forgotten theirs as unobtrusively as I could. It was in my own interest, I didn’t want to interrupt the flow.
The constant availability of his personal prompter had a galvanising effect on my fiancé Joseph, who became almost animated and adopted a benignly fatherly manner that could hardly be the result of what he had seen in his own family.
In the final scene, when the girls had all become occupying angels, leaving the shepherds cowering at the edge, completely overshadowed and out-blinged, I graciously smiled while everyone adored me one more time and then plunged into my final monologue. I savoured every word and was astonished by their grace and wisdom, as if I, too, had heard them for the first time. Maybe even my sister would now take her hands off her ears.
When my monologue ended, there was a moment of silence.
The audience, of whom I had been keenly aware all through the play as a huge dark animal supplying power to the stage, gave a big collective breath.
Everyone knew it was over. Well, over save the carol singing.
Out of the corner of my eye I could see the teacher in the wings raising her arms to give the cue when a voice rang out from the back, loud and clear, without a cough but in a defiantly strong rural accent:
‘What is that brightness in the sky…’
Several of the angels turned round to reveal a supernatural creature, half shepherd, half sheep, standing proudly at the back, waving to her grandmother.
The teacher urgently started the music.
The carols went on and on. Never mind.
The angels and shepherds were happy.
My not-quite-friend was happy, at least for the moment, until the consequences of her defiance caught up with her as they surely would. Her grandmother was happy, too.
The uncles were happy – another good joke. Maybe school plays weren’t so bad after all.
The teachers were happy – they were triumphant directors who had succeeded against all odds.
The snotty girl was happy, having played all the important angels by herself.
Joseph was happy. He’d made it through the entire play without throwing up.
I was the happiest of all.
Surely, everyone was happy, I thought. Peace on earth and so forth. Right then, I believed it all.
When I ran to join my parents in the after play throng, I overheard the headmaster reluctantly acknowledge Joseph’s repeated requests for praise, and then remark darkly on the inadvisability of inter-faith marriages.
‘I must say I agree with you there’, said my father. I looked up, astonished. This seemed a little out of character – or had the Catholic play been so persuasive that even my father’s fiercely independent mind was finally overcome?
The headmaster seemed to share my astonishment.
‘Yes’, my father continued, ‘I think it can be quite dangerous for a girl to marry a Catholic.’
A look passed between the two fathers that I was unable to decode before we were interrupted by the headmaster’s wife, carrying two of their babies while two toddlers threw themselves at Joseph’s legs.
‘I would advise my daughters against it’, my father said. The headmaster grabbed Joseph once more by the shoulders. Maybe that was a good thing. We didn’t want any black eyes here, like the innkeeper’s, although I am sure the uncles would have found it hilarious.
My mother, as if to contradict my father, reached into my hair and painfully ripped the pins away so that my fringe fell down again, once more hiding my Neanderthal forehead whose sight would surely scare all suitors away, Catholic or not. We were in no position to be picky.
I reached up to where I felt my skin burn from the traces that the sharp ends of the pins had scratched into it. My mother slapped my hand away.
Yes, the play was over for sure. I was no longer the Virgin Mary, and I was no longer the princess. I was only me. But I carried the experience inside, deep and beautiful, where no one could touch me.
(And as for Joseph, his father need not have worried. He never spoke another word to me. Not one.)
I still had my costume, the dress of the archangel Gabriel, never worn on stage and never admired by anyone but me and my aunt in the female privacy in of our bathroom. (My aunt, by the way, was unable to attend the school play because she was auditioning for the chorus of the Rocky Horror Picture show, a part that she managed to get, and tour in for almost five years until she got her big breakthrough as Magenta the Domestic and became a household name.)
I knew better than to put the dress on again and rolled it up carefully to give it back.
‘Actually’, said my father, ‘this costume is all wrong.’
I looked at him, standing in the door frame of his den. What could he possibly know about princesses?
‘And you were all wrong too’, he said, ‘and so was your teacher and that snotty girl.’
In a way this was typical of my father, waiting until it was all over and then throwing a complete spanner into the works retroactively.
‘The angels’, he continued with satisfaction at his superior knowledge that would bring all our collective houses of cards falling down in one fell swoop, ‘the angels in the Bible are all male.’
I stared back at him. Something about the Greek and Hebrew words for them, apparently.
No mystery this time about whether he wanted me to agree with him. I tried to retain a neutral expression but there was a limit to what I could pretend, at least at the age of nine.
In fact I thought my father’s opinion was blatantly ludicrous.
I thought about all the pictures of angels I had seen. On Christmas cards, and on wrapping paper, and in children’s books. And even in painted pictures that were art from long ago.
Angels had long wavy (and usually blonde) hair and heart shaped faces, they wore white silky dresses and smiled sweetly. Sometimes they played instruments or sang in high angelic voices but mostly they just stood there being beautiful, inviting the viewer’s admiration. They were just a small step away from being brides.
Obviously, they could on
ly be female.
Surely my father was not suggesting that men should dress like that? And appear on stage? (At the time I had not yet seen my aunt in the Rocky Horror Show, obviously, and would not for quite some time to come. My father went but my mother refused to join him or even listen to his eagerly offered reports, and pointedly never left me alone with my showbusiness aunt again until I left school.)
But at the time, when I was nine, standing there with my bridal angel dress regretfully wrapped up to be returned to the needlework teacher, I doubted my father, deeply and for the very first time.
What could an amateur theologian like him (and from the wrong religion, too!) possibly know about angels? He must have misunderstood, or maybe those who explained those things to him were misinformed themselves. I knew my father didn’t read Greek or Hebrew but relied on translation.
But who would know?
I thought of all the priests, teachers and religious instructors in the surrounding villages and towns. None of them seemed an ultimate authority to me.
At least not on the matter of angels.
Maybe my mother was right in objecting to all the secret activities in my father’s tiny den if this was the outcome.
Who knew? Anything?
I didn’t.
But there was knowledge somewhere, deep inside.
I knew that since I was in the play and I knew it would never go away again.
I knew that however much I was at the mercy of history and politics and however much I was suffering the fate that others had created, I was also uniquely myself.
And so while I never became the princess, at least not in public, I was the Virgin Mary, the woman at the core of the universe, for a few short hours, when I was nine, even if I had the wrong hair and the wrong religion. I will never forget that. Not until I die and maybe not even after.
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